Hundreds Rally Against Student’s Dad’s Deportation

Hundreds of Yale students, immigrant rights activists, and community allies rallied through the streets of downtown New Haven on Tuesday night in support of a Yale undergraduate’s father who has been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Colorado and faces deportation to Mexico.

Wrapped in scarves, coats, bullhorns, and posters, around 400 demonstrators marched and chanted along Crown Street, High Street, and Elm Street from 8:30 to 9 p.m. on Tuesday in opposition to an immigration enforcement system that they said unjustly tears families apart.

The protesters then gathered on the quad outside of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library for another hour to listen to speakers pledge their support for the immediate release of Melecio Andazola Morales, a 41-year-old construction worker who has been held for the past week at the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) Denver Contract Detention Facility in Aurora, Colorado.

Andazola Morales was detained by ICE on Thursday, Oct. 12, after he and his daughter Viviana Andazola Marquez, a 21-year-old senior at Yale College, visited the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services building in Denver to petition for Andazola Morales to receive permanent U.S. residency status.

Andazola Morales came to the United States in 1998 from his birthplace of Chihuahua, Mexico, in search of employment and to join his older brothers, who had all become U.S. citizens through the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. He has spent the past 20 years working construction in Denver and raising four children, all U.S. citizens.

According to Viviana Andazola Marquez, when she and her father visited the Denver immigration offices last week, ICE officials led them to believe that Andazola Morales’ application for permanent residency had been approved. But then his lawyer and ICE agent asked Andazola Morales to tell his daughter to leave the room, at which time they apprehended Andazola Morales and promptly sent him to the Denver detention center to await deportation back to Mexico. 

Speaking with the Independent from Aurora on Tuesday afternoon, Andazola Marquez said that her father was still in custody, and that his lawyers were preparing to file a formal stay of removal with Denver’s ICE offices early on Wednesday morning. ​“I’m just very tired,” Andazola Marquez said. ​“And I hope that my father is released soon.”

Back in New Haven, friends, classmates, and local immigrant rights advocates have spent the past week assiduously raising awareness of Andazola Morales’s story, crowdsourcing social and financial support for his family, and putting pressure on public officials to speak out against his detention.

Working closely with New Haven immigrant rights activist Kica Matos, Marquez’s friends and fellow Yale undergraduates Yuni Chang, Maya Jenkins, Fernando Rojas, and Ivetty Estepan have gathered over 18,000 signatures for an online petition, addressed to the acting director of ICE in Colorado, that requests Andazola Morales’s immediate release from detention. They have set up a GoFundMe page that has raised over $67,000 in support of Morales and his family. And they have released a video explaining Morales’ case that has garnered over 300,000 views on Facebook.

On Tuesday night, a week’s worth of advocacy culminated in a mass demonstration through Yale’s campus and downtown New Haven that brought hundreds of people into the streets in vocal support of Andazola Marquez, Andazola Morales, and the country’s undocumented immigrant population more broadly. A parallel rally took place simultaneously on Tuesday night outside the Colorado detention center where Andazola Morales is currently being held.

The New Haven demonstration began at 8:30 p.m. at Yale’s Latino Cultural Center at 301 Crown St., where the student organizers gathered hand-drawn posters, neon-pink glow sticks, and protest chant sheets as they prepared to take the streets.

Outside on Crown Street, they met up with several hundred supporters and, with the roads closed to traffic by the NHPD, proceeded to march towards Yale’s campus.

Estepan conducted the rally from the front of the line, shouting crowd-control instructions to rally marshals, orchestrating photo ops in front of Yale landmarks, and galvanizing the crowd with calls of ​“Free Melecio.”

Megaphones in hand, Chang and fellow Yale student Naiya Speight-Leggett led the crowd in chants of ​“Up, up with liberation. Down, down with deportation.” And ​“I say borders, we don’t need ​‘em. All we want is total freedom.”

When the protest reached Yale’s campus, the various organizers took turns at the microphone, standing before the crowd in front of a giant light display that read #FreeMelecio, projected on Sterling library’s façade, and alongside a smaller, inflatable movie screen that played through a slideshow of Andazola Morales family photos.

Reading from a text prepared by Andazola Marquez, Rojas described the scene that his classmate and her father encountered in the Denver immigration offices. ​“My father was detained by ICE,” he said, quoting Andazola Marquez. ​“It was not random. It was their plan all along. They dangled the fruit in front of us, and we bit.”

Jason and Erick Ramos, two brothers from Meriden whose parents won a temporary stay of deportation from a New York judge in September, celebrated the high turnout at Tuesday’s rally, and said that they were ashamed of their country’s immigration system.

“We demand justice now,” Jason said. ​“Not just the DREAM Act. Not just stopping deportation. Not just stopping the detention centers that profit off of imprisonment of the most vulnerable, the most underrepresented in this country. We want Melecio out now, and we want a future for him and his family.”

Quoting La Santa Cecilia’s song ​“Ice El Hielo,” Matos said that ICE is loose in the streets, and that everyone needs to worry about the havoc that they can wreak on immigrant families and the communities in which they live. ​“No one is safe from ICE,” she said. ​“Not you. Not me. Not Viviana. No immigrant in New Haven is safe from ICE. And so it is up to us to wrap our arms around those immigrants and say to ICE: Hell no!”

She praised New Haven for standing up in support of Nury Chavarria, an undocumented immigrant who found sanctuary in a Fair Haven church earlier this year before earning a stay of deportation, as well as for Marco Reyes, a Meriden man who has spent the past two months living in a downtown church as he waits for a Second Circuit Court of Appeals judge to rule on his requested stay of deportation.

The last speaker of the night, Jesus Morales Sanchez from Unidad Latina en Accion, told the crowd that ​“resistance” does not mean showing up to a rally once and waving a clever poster in front of a camera. ​“Our resistance means showing compassion for people who are defying the system, for people who are living across the street in sanctuary and saying fuck you to ICE,” he said.

“Resistance means showing up and using your privilege. Resistance means advocating and demanding for change. Demand that your campus become a sanctuary campus. Demand that your city become a sanctuary city. Demand change. Don’t ask for it.”