3rd Annual New Years Eve Noise Demo held outside Wyatt Detention Facility, calling to end Central Falls ICE contract

“We make noise to remind the people inside that they are not forgotten. That in the New Year, we will continue to push to dismantle this system.”

A press release from AMOR (Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance):

On New Year’s Eve, AMOR organized the third annual Noise Demo protest outside the Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, RI, calling to end the ICE contract, shut down the prison, and end United States Imperial policies from the Wyatt to Palestine. AMOR is an alliance mobilizing to prevent, respond to, and end State violence against our community.

“We are here as part of a long tradition of holding noise demos on New Year’s Eve to show solidarity with the people inside,” says Sophia Wright of AMOR. “We make noise to remind the people inside that they are not forgotten. That in the New Year, we will continue to push to dismantle this system.”

Here’s the video:

A historic high of 114 people are imprisoned by ICE in Central Falls, according to the most recent numbers published in November 2024, almost double the population incarcerated by ICE only two months prior. The present ICE contract with the Wyatt Detention Facility allows ICE to imprison up to 255 people in Central Falls. 38,728 people were imprisoned in immigration detention nationwide as of December 1, 2024. [This number has been corrected. An earlier version of this story had the wrong number.]

Throughout the long history of racist, exclusionary immigration practices in this country, detention and deportation have always been impossible without the complicity of local communities. The incoming administration will attempt to draw on local infrastructures of policing and incarceration built up by both Democrat and Republican administrations, and Rhode Islanders attended the Noise Demo in refusal to allow the local community to be complicit.

The Noise Demo was organized in collaboration with numerous Rhode Island organizations calling for an end to the occupation of Palestine, including Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance, Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), and RI PSL. The New Year’s Eve action began with speeches by local organizers, drawing attention to ways in which the United States military-industrial complex generates weaponry, surveillance technologies, and racial logic that proliferate across United States bordering regimes from the US/Mexico border to Gaza. Around 50 protesters then marched together around the Detention Facility. People incarcerated inside looked out through the prison’s narrow windows.

On December 18, 2024, AMOR received reports from immigrants imprisoned in Central Falls, describing medical neglect, unsanitary conditions, repression of communication among those detained as well as with family outside the prison, racist and anti-immigrant ridicule by prison administrators, and threats of punitive reprisal for communicating grievances.

The implications of this abuse and neglect were made tragically evident in the 2008 death of Hiu Lui “Jason” Ng, a migrant from China who was killed by ICE at the Wyatt Detention Facility due to medical neglect. Public pressure and investigation led ICE to end its contract that year, which was not renewed until 2019. The December 2024 reports make it chillingly obvious that conditions that led to Ng’s death are present again today.