16 Arrested for Showing Portraits of People Killed by ICE in DC Senate Building
The action by members of the Women’s March used artist Gianluca Costantini’s drawings of Alex Pretti, Renée Good, and other victims of ICE violence.
WASHINGTON, DC — Police arrested 16 protesters who unfurled banners bearing portraits of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) victims on the marble floor of the Hart Senate Office Building yesterday, August 5, according to a statement issued by Women's March.
The protesters were members of the Women’s March advocacy organization and had staged a “die-in” while holding banners representing the tombstones of people who were killed by ICE agents or died in ICE custody. They had gathered to call out senators who had financed ICE’s violence and were preparing to leave Washington for the August recess, the group said.
Capitol Police has not yet responded to Hyperallergic’s inquiries about the arrests or charges.
The banners featured hand-drawn illustrations by Italian artist Gianluca Costantini depicting the faces of Alex Pretti, Renée Good, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Ruben Ray Martinez, Ryan Carol Kidd, Jonah Neal, Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, and two other unidentified individuals. Held up like gravestones in uneven rows, the portraits include their names and the month and date of their deaths, along with the words “Killed by I.C.E.”
“My drawings portray people who died in ICE custody not as numbers or headlines, but as individual lives: faces, bodies, families, and stories that deserve to be remembered,” Costantini wrote in an email to Hyperallergic.
Women’s March has been running campaigns directly calling out and appealing to ICE agents over the past year.
“Women’s March is in this fight because ICE’s violence doesn’t end with the people it detains or kills. Women are left to carry the wreckage, for their families, their communities, and each other,” the group’s executive director, Rachel O’Leary Carmona, said in the press release.
Costantini has long collaborated with advocacy organizations across the world, including ActionAid, Amnesty International, and Words Without Borders. He was accused of terrorism by the Turkish government in 2016 because of his resistance art and is most well known for a controversial short comic he created about the Charlie Hebdo shooting attack.
Shortly after the banners were unfurled on Wednesday, police snatched and crumpled them up and arrested the protestors, who were zip-tied, escorted out of the building, and placed in police vans.
Women’s March protestors also unfurled black and white banners from upper-level balconies reading “ICE Kills” and “Abolish ICE,” alongside another bearing the names and numbers of people who have been murdered by ICE or have died in ICE custody — at least 54 total since Trump took office for his second term. The protestors had amended the figures, crossing them out with red paint, to recognize the higher number as more information comes to light.
Although it is illegal under D.C. Code § 10-503.16 and federal regulations to protest in the Capitol or congressional buildings, Costantini said that “it is important to force political representatives to confront the consequences of their policies.”
“Behind words such as ‘enforcement’ and ‘detention’ are people separated from their loved ones, abused, neglected, and killed,” Constantini told Hyperallergic. “Art can make visible what institutions try to turn into something abstract or invisible.”
