About 200 protesters gathered outside the Federal Building Friday afternoon on State Street in Rochester to voice their concerns about recent incidents involving immigrants in Western NY.
The protest was actually scheduled even before Thursday night’s rally outside the Border Patrol station in Irondequoit. It had been scheduled in connection with the recent detention of farmworkers in Orleans County.
But Thursday night’s incident brought an additional sense of urgency to the downtown protest.
This was after Geneseo Police had made a traffic stop, with a vehicle containing two women and several children. Police say there was not a licensed driver in the car and an officer called Border Patrol agents to help with identification of the driver.
The group was brought to the Border Patrol station and demonstrators gathered there, upset that the women and children were being held.
Customs’ officials say an adult female and her daughter were released along with four children.
The other adult woman and her young brother were found to be in the U.S. illegally and were turned over to customs officials in Buffalo. Activists say that the woman and her brother were later released as well.
But the entire incident still upsets people like Maria Delgado-Sutton, who is active in local farmworker issues.
“You take five people who go to work every single day and you stop them just because of their skin color, there’s something wrong with that, there’s something wrong with this system. We are not going to stand for that, no one should be stopped based on the color of their skin.”
An organizer of the rally, Carly Fox, called for people to have greater concern for what farmworkers have to go through.
“We’ve got to take it up a notch because we’re connected to the farmworkers in everything we do in every way. We are eating the food, they live in our communities, their hard work, they’re risking their lives when they come into work every day."
Organizers of Friday’s rally say they are upset about policies that criminalize immigrants just because they are undocumented.
Video of the protest by Sasha-Ann Simons:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDIBoZzuuts&feature=youtu.be