Community members from Great Neck and beyond gathered on the corner of Bond Street and Grace Avenue in Great Neck Plaza to protest ICE’s immigration crackdown on Thursday, Jan. 8.
The protest attracted community groups from across Long Island and also served as a vigil for Renee Nicole Good, who was killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis this week.
Nina Gordon and Ron Gross have held protests against the Trump administration at the intersection since May 2025, but Thursday had their biggest turnout so far.
“I was so depressed by what happened yesterday,” Gordon said about the death of Good.
But she also said that making music gave her hope. Gordon reminisced about when she was 10 years old and her mother mailed her the lyrics to “Blowin’ in the Wind” by Bob Dylan.
Over 60 years later, Gordon played that very song on the corner of the neighborhood she grew up in.
Gross, who is still active in the community at 90 years old, spoke on the need not to give up hope as Gordon strummed her guitar.
Gross handed out flyers marking 12 “Achievements of the Resistance Movement” that he said were important to remember, lest they be “overshadowed by the demon of despondency.”
After weeks of protesting at the same intersection, Gross noticed a memorial stone to former Great Neck Plaza Deputy Mayor Roger Weiss thatsaid: “He gave, when most would have given up.”
“That’s what we’re doing,” Gross said. “When other people gave up, he kept pushing. He kept working.”
Gordon was inspired to organize by Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, one of the first openly lesbian rabbis and the leader of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, the largest LGBTQ synagogue in the world.
Kleinbaum started the Beacon in January 2025 as a way to organize hyperlocal protest movements after Donald Trump’s re-election.
Gordon held the protest in conjunction with the Beacon, but other organizations came to support it as well.
Members from community groups like Engage Long Island, the Bellmore Merrick Democratic Club, and Veterans for Peace all came out to the protest on Thursday.
Rachel Klein, a founding member of Engage Long Island, traveled to Great Neck for the protest.
Klein said that she helped create the social justice and political activism group because “everything [she] cared about was under assault.”
Great Neck resident Martha Hirsch told Schneps Media LI, “We have a commandment to love the stranger … my Jewish soul knows what it is to be an immigrant.”
Gordon is a lifelong resident of Great Neck and grew up in a progressive family that brought her along to civil rights marches when she was just 8 years old.
“This was a very liberal and progressive town in the 1960s,” Gordon said.
But politics in the peninsula have changed.
In the 2024 presidential election, most precincts in Great Neck voted for Trump by over 15 percentage points with 90% of some precincts voting Trump.
Gordon said some of this was because of demographic change, saying that the Iranian community in Great Neck is more conservative.
“It puzzles me,” Gordon said, “because they came here fleeing oppression from a reactionary dictator and yet they all support Trump.”
In this partisan Republican peninsula, the protesters received some pushback on Thursday.
One passerby shouted “Assholes!” as he drove by.
Gordon recalled a time at a previous protest when a man driving by in a cybertruck shouted “Trump 2028” and gave them the middle finger.
“There’s no winning,” Gordon said. “You just have to kind of meet it with kindness and love … Even if people don’t come and stand with us, they see us, and they see that there is resistance to authoritarianism.”
