Hundreds of Long Islanders lined Suffolk Avenue on the corner of Brentwood Parkway on Sunday afternoon in a rally against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rounding up immigrants in their communities.
The “Keep Our Families Together Rally” was organized by the Islip Forward Organization, a community collective that empowers residents through advocacy and civic engagement to demand protection for immigrant families and accountability and transparency from the government. New York State Assembly Deputy Speaker Phil Ramos (D-Brentwood), founder of Islip Forward Ahmad Perez and Pilar Moya of Latinos United Long Island, along with other speakers, addressed the crowd in a news conference.
“This is not democracy. This is not safety. This is fascism,” Ramos said about community members being afraid to go to work or walk into a courthouse in fear of being stopped by ICE.
Ramos discussed the stories of two brothers from Central Islip, Jose and Josue Trejos, who were widely reported to have been deported despite having open applications for special immigration protection. Ramos also shed light on a Brentwood mother who was recently taken into custody by ICE.
“She wasn’t hiding. She was working. She was raising five beautiful children,” Ramos said. “Now, those five children cry themselves to sleep every night, crying for their mother’s love, without knowing if they will ever see their mother again.”
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Moya called on local elected officials and Gov. Kathy Hochul to launch independent investigations into fire departments suspected of cooperating with ICE, ban agencies from asking for immigration status and supporting the “New York for All” legislation, which would prohibit local and state police from enforcing federal immigration laws, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Perez, Islip Forward’s founder, has also launched an ICE tracker app with his organization — which has 60,000 uses so far — that notifies users of ICE activity in their communities and helps them know their rights.
“To date, we have identified 33 verified sightings of ICE in Suffolk County,” Perez said. “We have seen them in the early morning hours come before school, as folks are having their morning breakfast, and we are fed up with that.”
These ICE sightings in Suffolk County have been a primary motivator for many rally attendees. Jalline Guevara, a 17-year-old rally attendee and director of Brentwood Votes, says that ICE was spotted a couple of streets down from her house, and people in the community have been living in fear because of it. Guevara believes that President Donald Trump is a dictator, who doesn’t understand the people who are impacted by ICE.
“[Trump] sees statistics,” Guevara said. “He sees numbers, he sees case files, but he does not see the families.”
Guevara draws from personal experience, as it took her mother over 15 years to achieve residency, and her father is still undocumented.
“He lives in fear every day wondering when ICE is going to take him, and that is a type of fear no child should have to live for,” Guevara said.
To Guevara, it was important for her to attend and speak at the rally to advocate for her parents who traveled to the United States to give her and her siblings a better chance. Kelly G, a 27-year-old Brentwood resident, security worker and rally attendee who asked that we not print her full name because of privacy concerns, feels similarly.
“My parents have fought for my future,” Kelly said. “They went through a lot just to get here and give me a better future. So I’m always going to do what I can to make sure that their future is safe as well.”
Larissa Escobar, a 19-year-old student from Miller Place attended the protest for similar reasons. Escobar believes the ICE sightings on Long Island are scary, and she believes the local senators and representatives don’t even try to help the communities impacted. On a personal level, Escobar’s father has lived in the United States for 21 years and has been unable to obtain legal status under President Donald Trump’s administration despite paying for legal services.
“It just makes me mad,” Escobar said. “He did everything correctly, he tried to get here correctly… he still couldn’t get papers.”
Sisters from Bay Shore Amanda Vesey-Askey, a 58-year-old who works for a healthcare nonprofit and Sharon Masrour, a 61-year-old college professor, attended the rally to speak up for what they believe is right.
“We have a vision for a nation whose policies are built on justice and love as opposed to hatred and discrimination,” Masrour said. “And we want to raise our families in a society like that.”
Vesey-Askey, who is a mother and grandmother, wants people who might think they are supporting “the rule of law” to know that it’s untrue, as people are being denied human rights at the hands of ICE.
“We’re on a quick slide toward fascism, and we need to speak up now before it’s too late,” Vesey-Askey said. “We need to preserve our democracy, and it doesn’t happen without people standing up.”
