Rally calls for an end to Providence Police working with ICE and attacks on the unhoused
"There’s one thing that unites us as poor people: We are at the mercy of the police," said Mike Araujo. "We’re at the mercy of landlords. We’re at the mercy of our bosses..."
In the wake of Providence Police officers seen on video collaborating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, contrary to publicly stated city policies, the Providence General Assembly (PGA), which does everything from political education to building community gardens to posting bond for people arrested by ICE, held a rally and speak-out outside City Hall on Wednesday.
The event, which had over 80 people in attendance, was under the watchful eye of maybe a dozen police officers in nine squad cars. The rally took on more than ICE collaboration and confronted tax increases that will lead to rent increases, police brutality in general, the city’s response to the Butler Hospital strike, and tax breaks for rich landlords. The flyer reads:
ICE is terrorizing immigrant communities throughout Providence.
Providence police are helping them, despite what Mayor Smiley says.PPD continues to stop-and-frisk & harass unhoused people downtown, when they aren’t turning noise complaints into a brawl.
Smiley just raised taxes (and rents) to hire even more police.
Providence is only a “Sanctuary City” for landlords, rich tax evaders, strikebreaking hospitals, and brutal cops. The people of Providence say, “Hell no!”
Here’s the video:
The transcript below has been edited for clarity and is not complete.
Emcee: We’re here not only to make our voices heard about brutality and oppression, but also about ICE raids. We are here to protect our community. We are here to protect ourselves and our neighbors because nobody else will do it. Certainly not the cops. You can see ‘em right over there. Do you think they’re protecting us right now? I don’t think so.
Any day of the week, you can see cops harass people based on race or perceived socioeconomic status. One of the first things I saw when I came to Providence was a cop doing his stupid little cop jog across the street to harass a group of black teenagers. That’s kind of the standard we expect. They stop and frisk people here. Does that make us safer? Does it make us safer when there’s a noise complaint and they take that as an excuse to crack heads? I don’t think so..
We’ve had plenty of time to develop low expectations. Providence has had a Homeless Bill of Rights for 13 years, and the cops have taken the opportunity to smash that thing into a million fucking pieces. They don’t care. Five years ago, when I was a little more naive, there was a protest at the State House, the George Floyd protest, and the cops threatened us with attack dogs and tear gas and all that. It didn’t break out into a scuffle or anything like that, but it could have. As I left the park under the shade of the trees, I saw these little knots of cops just hanging around with big bundles of zip ties at their waist. I asked them what they thought about all this, and they said, "This is just about outside agitators."
That’s what the cops are about. They’re just waiting, excited for their opportunity to beat the shit out of you for complaining and delegitimize your method of complaints or protest. No matter what it is, we can’t expect anything of them. And now we find out that the Providence Police are working with ICE.
We have video, testimony, and news reports. Their chief will go up there and say, “No, no, no, no, no. We are not working with ICE.”
We saw you! We saw the video. We heard you. We know the truth. We saw you collaborate, break into a house, and drag people away. Mayor Smiley is raising taxes - and sometimes taxes need to go up - but he is raising them to hire more cops.
How much of that money is going to go toward protecting you and your neighbors from ICE? How much of any of the money that flows through this building is going toward protecting us from ICE? I think it’s pretty much zero.
When they spend money on cops and assisting ICE, that should go towards social services - they are defunding you. We talked about "defund the police" five years ago, and that faded out of the zeitgeist. They got their way and kept defunding us, and when you’re defunded, you can only stick together to protect each other.
The politicians in this city, whether because of their inclination, ability, or more abstract structural factors, are not going to be able to do it. This rally is put together by the Providence General Assembly, a movement space to help us organize, protect, and support each other. We must do this because that help is not coming; here’s city hall, and we see the consequences.
The PGA does a lot. We do everything from political education to building community gardens to posting bond for people arrested by ICE. The Providence General Assembly meets at the Mathewson Street Church every two weeks on the fourth floor. The next meeting is August 9th at noon.
The first speaker, John Chiellini, has lived experience with housing issues and now works to address the roots of the issues that push people onto the street. He’s an active member of the Rhode Island Homeless Advocacy Project (RIHAP) and the unhoused solidarity working group of the PGA.
John Chiellini: Look at this building. This is Providence City Hall. It’s supposed to be the People’s house, but we’re here today because the man inside, Brett Smiley, has forgotten who he works for. It’s us. Voting matters. This city, our city, has made two promises. The first is a promise to our most vulnerable neighbors. Rhode Island passed a Homeless Bill of Rights, which says you do not lose your humanity, dignity, or rights just because you lose your home.
But tell that to the person whose tent, their only shelter, was torn down and thrown in a garbage truck like it’s trash. Tell that to the person whose lifesaving medication and irreplaceable family, violent encampment sweep.
The Providence Police harass, intimidate, and seize the property of our unhoused neighbors, a direct violation of that promise. These aren’t random acts. This is a policy - a cruelty - and the buck stops right here.
We are here to tell Brett Smiley to stop the sweeps of the homeless and respect the Homeless Bill of Rights.
That brings me to the second broken promise. Providence calls itself a sanctuary city. It’s not just a PR slogan, it’s supposed to be a shield. It’s the Community Safety Act, a law we fought for, designed to protect our immigrant neighbors and build trust between the community and the police. But what good is that shield if the man holding it keeps letting ICE poke holes in it?
We see what’s happening. We know that minor traffic stops are being used to feed our neighbors into the deportation pipeline. We know the joint task force is just a back door for the Providence Police to collaborate with ICE, doing the bidding for the federal agents who want to tear our families apart, especially now that the federal government is pushing for more aggressive immigration enforcement.
This is when we need our mayor to stand strong. We need a real sanctuary, not a hollow one. Instead, we have a mayor who allows his police department to violate the spirit, and often the letter, of the sanctuary law.
Look at who is being targeted by the policies: the person with no home and the person threatened by deportation. It is an attack on the vulnerable. It is a policy that says if you are poor, if you are an immigrant, if you are struggling, then this city is not for you. We reject that version of Providence.
The Reverend Duane Clinker is a minister who retired from the Open Table of Christ and Mathewson Street Church.
Reverend Clinker: I want to shout out to the Providence General Assembly that organized this. They meet regularly at Mathewson Street Church, and if you haven’t come, you should think about coming because it’s one of the best places I’ve seen that can have all kinds of people sitting together in a room. There needs to be a lot more diversity, honestly - that’s always something we have to work on - but the Providence General Assembly is an experiment, a different kind of organizing, and a different way of organizing that I think is very important.
My experience at Mathewson Street Church woke me up a lot in terms of the housing issue. If you haven’t been there, I invite you to go there at about show up at 7:30 am on Sunday morning. They’ll let you in, and you can help in the kitchen or hang out and have a good breakfast. Just sit down and have a meal with 200 or 300 folks there who are unhoused. Just meet people, be with them, and help wherever possible. That’s the kind of horizontal movement we’ve got to have because we’re in trouble right now. We’ve got a systems problem.
It’s good to vote. It’s good to run for office if that’s what you feel called to do. We certainly have to build organizations of political power, but we’re in a new situation right now. I’m 78 years old, and my generation saw some stuff. We saw some hints, but you know what we’re into now. We’re into a fascist grab. It sounds like giving them too much respect to say that they’re a gang of corrupt people, but they are going after our rights, and the unhoused also.
I grew up in a society where, in most urban areas, there were no unhoused people on the street. And what happened? Reagan and Clinton, basically. That crew came in and defunded housing. That’s one of the reasons we have what we have today. It wasn’t in the country where I grew up. It’s a newer thing.
This latest executive order is a hijack, a deal of “Let’s sweep the streets.” That’s a solution. Did anybody read Trump’s executive order on housing? He says the old way didn’t go after the cause of being unhoused, and the cause, of course, is people who want to do drugs and are mentally ill.
The order doesn’t mention affordable housing. How many people here have the money for an affordable, secure apartment? What’s going on? What are we going to do about it? What can we do about it?
This is the thing that gets me, which is why, if you’re not unhoused, I think it’s important to be in solidarity. People are dying on the streets. Literally. That didn’t used to be a thing, but it’s a thing now. Last winter, people didn’t have a warm place to stay. Do you understand? People are dying because of this. I don’t know how many. People much younger than I died in my two years at Matthewson Street Church. This is a killer. This is a killer, and it’s not right.
And here’s the thing: If Mayor Smiley, behind these thick walls, can’t get or understand it, then we have a systems problem. When Trump tells the police to sweep the streets and everybody who’s mentally ill is going to be forced into civil ordered care or jail, which do you think is funded?
The jails are funded.
They will let human beings, because of poverty, die on the streets of Rhode Island. (And not even count them, by the way. Try to get the death certificates. They don’t keep track of how many people die. The death certificate should say the cause of death is homelessness.) If they’re not even concerned enough to count them, and we let that go, and we don’t fight like hell to stop that, how long is it going to be before we see children dying on the street? If we accept people dying on the streets who are often disabled or old, even though they’re younger than me in many cases, what do we do?
The Constitution was full of slavery and rights for the wealthy. We say it was a democratic thing, and it had aspects of that, but only for white, propertied males. It’s a document of slavery. It’s a document that’s going after the Native American people. So is the Declaration of Independence. But the Constitution has one thing in there that kept us believing for a while: It says that the purpose of government is for the common good. What about them words? It’s not property rights that govern everything - that’s enshrined in our law - but it’s the common good. We’ve got to help each other.
I want to say two more things. It’s a systems problem; we must think in a revolutionary context. It’s good to run for office if that’s your thing. And it’s important, sometimes, to have people running for office. It’s good to vote if there’s somebody to vote for. That’s a good thing. Those are little tiny leverages of power. But we have to have more than that now because it’s property that has the rights now. The elite have the rights, and we’ve got to overcome that. We’ve got to think outside the box, and we will only do it together.
I’m a follower of Jesus - or I try to be. We are also coming up with a hard fight against religious nationalism. Somewhere in the Bible, it says, "He has no place to lay his head." You know what that means, right? It means we work from the bottom up. It means we have to work from the bottom up. We have to be in solidarity with each other. One of the measures of the movement we’re supposed to be in is, “What did you do? What did you do when people were unhoused and hungry?”
Mike King is a founding member of the Providence General Assembly and a member of the Unhoused Solidarity Working Group, the Kennedy Plaza Police Observation Project, and the immigrant solidarity group.
Mike King: We started the Kennedy Plaza Police Observation project a couple of months ago after hearing stories of people living on the street, getting harassed by the police. Police in multiple squad cars, pulling up on people, four or five cars pulling up on people, flashing their lights at them, honking their horn at five o’clock in the morning, were sleeping on the sidewalk. There are a hundred newly hired cops, and there have been an enormous number of harassment arrests in and around this area. That’s why we started the police observation project. I think half of the police officers are here right now, for some reason. It is criminal what they’re doing. It’s a violation of the Homeless Bill of Rights. It is stop and frisk. Police Chief Oscar Perez admitted as much when he came and talked to RIHAP a couple of months ago, stopping people because they had a bag on them and because they were hanging out in the park for three hours. After all, they have no place else to go.
There’s no reasonable suspicion. This is profiling. It’s a violation of people’s constitutional rights. It’s a violation of the Homeless Bill of Rights. Are we going to stand for cops kicking people when they’re already down? That’s why we’re here. Could policing ever solve this problem? No. The problem isn’t the people living on the streets. It’s the conditions that have given them nowhere else to go. Sky-high rents, service providers that don’t serve, and politicians saying they will do their best. I’ve heard numerous times from people who live on the streets that the conditions are better than those in some shelters.
Mayor Smiley, amongst other things, is the husband of the richest landlord in the state. Do we really expect him to give a shit? It isn’t that it’s bad leadership. It’s class warfare. They raised taxes on residential property by 10%, likely leading to a rent increase of over 10%. The tax money is going to a hundred more police officers, over the hundred they hired last year. This is not just the failed leadership of neoliberal Democrats like Smiley. It’s emblematic of the whole bourgeois capitalist order that’s crumbling by the day. That order, unfortunately, is being replaced by the Trump spectacle of violence and terror directed at immigrants throughout the country. Trump’s recent executive order, which incentivizes forcefully institutionalizing the unhoused and likely a range of other groups, seeks to make good on his eugenic promises on the campaign trail. Are we going to let these people round up and lock up the unhoused? Are you going to let these people lock up the trans community and the mentally ill?
The question is, what does that know look like in action? I’m not just asking you. I’m asking myself. We need to be organized. We need to have conversations about how to best address these threats. We need to be both defensive and offensive in our strategy. We need to defend ourselves, stand in solidarity with each other, and protect those under attack. Soon we will need to step into more bold and offensive action. We also need to try and pull in as many people as possible to these efforts. Most people are angry, scared, overwhelmed, a little bit of all three. There are more of us than there are of them.
We are only weak when we aren’t together. We need to find ways to collectively confront these injustices. We need to not only protest institutions like ICE, but also effectively disrupt them. The immigrant solidarity group is trying to determine the best ways to do that. We can do none of these things on our own. These things won’t just spontaneously happen. We’re doing much of this building within the Providence General Assembly.
Vivian is one of the founders and organizers at POWR.
Vivian: Recently, we decided, because of everything that’s going on, that we are working towards a Rent Strike in Providence. We understand that organizing a rent strike is going to be a hard effort. You need to collect rent every week or every month because otherwise, people are going to spend their rent money on shit. That means that we need to build a lot of unity and educate people about people’s rights.
Your landlord, if you have a landlord, is supposed to register their property with the state of Rhode Island. If they’re not registered, you can’t be evicted for nonpayment of rent. Isn’t that crazy? You can’t be evicted for not paying your rent.
Unfortunately, folks could be terminated from their tenancy if they don’t have a lease, and we know that most people don’t. But there’s another way you can withhold your rent: to petition a judge. Now, thanks to reps like David Morales and senators like Tiara Mack, who pushed through this bill a few years back, anyone who doesn’t have their lead certificate or has lead violations in their home could go and pay their rent to the courts if their landlord isn’t in the rental registry. We’re going to be telling everyone this good news, and we’re going to build our power while we do that: going door-to-door, block-by-block, and building-by-building, letting people know that we can unite together in our buildings, on our blocks, and in our city to fight for lower rents because goddamn, the rents are too damn high.
The rents are too damn high, and they’re only going to keep on getting higher. Politicians at city hall and the city council just passed a tax increase that will be pushed onto the tenants, especially tenants living in non-owner occupied homes, who are the most absentee landlords and the most tenants. It’s going to be a 14% increase, and you better believe that the landlords are going to push the rent up even higher than that. This is just an excuse to push the rent up higher.
Some progressive politicians say they will introduce rent stabilization, when DARE (Direct Action for Rights and Equality) has been fighting it since 2018, and for rent control and just-cause eviction protections for a long time before that. I’ve been at DARE’s Tenant and Homeowners Association meetings for at least the last five years, and the City Council is watering down their ideas.
I’m not trying to harp on that campaign, because it’s a righteous campaign, but the proposal that I’ve seen, at least from the City Council, is watering down what DARE proposed. There’s not going to be any just-cause protections against eviction. There’s not going to be renewable leases or indefinite rental agreements. There’s so much that the City Council has taken out of it. It’s a modest proposal to cap the rent increases at 4% so they can keep increasing yearly.
During the pandemic, during 2022, every week, multiple times a week, people come into POWR asking about their rights because they were getting evicted for no goddamn reason, because the rents were supposedly going up, and every landlord wanted to raise their rents because they heard every other landlord was doing it.
We need to ban evictions. We need more low-income public housing, not just all this ‘affordable housing,’ unless it includes a substantial amount of low-income housing in those projects. We need public housing. We need to ban evictions, and we need to either freeze or lower the rents. That’s what POWR is saying. We need to stop rents from going too damn high.
That’s why we’re here today, because we know that the more the rent goes up, it will affect all of us, especially those who’ve lived here our whole lives. Lifetime renters. Not everyone is getting the dream of home ownership. The average house in Rhode Island has a starting price of $500k. That’s just not happening. We’re seeing, across the country, and soon here, probably, that immigrant families are losing their breadwinners to this fucked up, racist, fascist fucking system that is being imposed on us.
Families are starting to go hungry. Like the Reverend said, families are starting to become unhoused. We know from our friends at Mathewson Street Church that they’re starting to see, slowly but surely, more and more immigrants coming in the door, unhoused, looking for help, looking for someone who cares.
The largest tenant union in the country, the Los Angeles Tenants Union, has been fighting for an eviction moratorium in L.A. during this rebellion a few months ago. This is what’s happening, and this is what will come here. All our struggles are connected, and we need to fight together to be a united front, a wall of resistance against all this fucked up, fascist, racist, classist, patriarchal fucking bullshit that’s coming down our way.
My last comments: I’m a trans woman, it’s probably obvious. And to some degree, my community, across the country, has been able to at least avoid some of the worst attacks that have been thrown our way. We know there were like 600 bills that failed, and there are some national attacks that have obviously gone through, and there are liberal hospital systems capitulating in blue states to what Trump wants. But some of the worst hasn’t come yet. The budget bill was supposed to strip us of our healthcare, and they didn’t do that.
I’m looking ahead to all the countries that liberalized after living through a conservative period, and I started thinking, what are they really being fucked up to LGBTQ folks, and that’s Russia. Basically, Russia is a fucking fascist as fuck state and they’ve banned gay people from existing in Russia. If you’re gay in Russia, you have to live in the closet or flee the country, and most poor people can’t flee the country. So what are they doing? The work they’re doing, because unfortunately they couldn’t fight what happened in their country until two late, is building shelters for folks. They’re having to build out programs to get people jobs. They must build out situations where they must get healthcare in other roles. That’s connected because I see a future where too many of us are going to be girls or guys, or non-binary siblings living on the street. And we don’t want to live in a society like that, so we’ve got to stick together, and when we fight, we win. So let’s do that.
Mike Araujo has been involved in class struggle in Providence for a long time. He is part of the Providence Workers Defense, founded on three premises:
Current conditions are intolerable for us, not for the elites.
Fascism is ascendant.
Only an organized working class can change things.
Mike Araujo: I’m going to switch up a little bit. We’ve been talking about housing, which is related to every aspect of our lives. We’ve been discussing who we can access as partners and friends. We talk about how we see each other as an ongoing thing. There’s one thing that unites us as poor people: we are at the mercy of the police. We’re at the mercy of landlords. We’re at the mercy of our bosses. We’re at the mercy of a state that doesn’t care about us. So we propose the most maximal plan, right? So I’m going to ask you to tell me. No justice?
Crowd: No peace!
Mike Araujo: That’s bullshit. And you know it’s bullshit. We say it at every march, ‘No justice, no peace.’ ‘Whose streets? Our streets.’ We lie every time we say it because we don’t take the streets, and we give them peace when we go home, when we have our parade on Saturday, hold up a sign, and give awards for the good signs and ominous signs and all that bullshit.
We have to be serious about what we’re doing, which means that when we’re saying things like ‘no justice, no peace,’ we have to be taking it into our hearts, that we don’t stop, that we give them no rest, that we give them no quarter. They show no mercy to us. So what do we show them?
Crowd: No mercy.
Mike Araujo: When we take it, we hold it, right? So whose streets? Our streets? Not yet, but they will be, right?
Right now, we live in fear of a carceral state, of schools that funnel us right into prison, of landlords that can put us on the street, and then we’re criminalized for being unhoused. If we’re hungry and we steal food, where do we go? We might be lucky, and we might be able to make it to a shelter. We might be lucky if the food and the good work they do are still being served at Mathewson. And we might be lucky to have a friend whose couch we can stay on for a couple of days. But that is unsustainable, right?
This whole system, this ugly system, depends on you as poor people, people in the margins, as queer people, as trans people, as Black people, as immigrants, to be on the bottom. It needs us on the bottom. But how many of us are there? It’s all of us. It’s all of us, all over the world. It’s not just Rhode Island, right? This struggle happens in London. This struggle happens in Hong Kong. This struggle happens in Paris, New York, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis. It happens to them, too.
What do we have when we hear our siblings suffering in other cities? We have solidarity. What’s the best way to express solidarity? By taking the land that belongs to us back and holding it.
But it’s not just the land, it’s also where we work. Our bosses, right now, are at the mercy of. Not in my lifetime, unions made up 35% of the workforce. We could pretty much write our own ticket. Now we’re down to 6%. Is that labor power? We have to be honest about that. That’s not where the center of power lies anymore. It lies in you, all of you, every single person here. When we are serious and honest and say things like ‘no justice, no peace,’ we agree that we do not give them peace when they do not give us mercy. We do not give them mercy when it’s time to take the streets. We hold our streets. When it’s time to take our jobs, we don’t ask for recognition.
We might be able to organize a union, and we might be able to present a contract. But who runs the business? We do. I’m looking at the people who do the work. All of you, whether you’re retired, disabled, or unhoused, you are part of a workforce, you’re part of a class of people who consistently, globally, have suffered the worst excesses and brutalities that capitalism, imperialism, patriotism, chauvinism, and authoritarianism can inflict on our bodies.
We bear all the scars, every single one of us. We bear all the scars that this system could apply to our backs, limbs, and hearts. We get separated from our souls when we go out. We say it’s just a fucking job when we leave our kids at home, when we know we should be at home with our kids. We leave a sick parent and trust their care to somebody else, when we see that we’re the ones who could do it better, or do it with help, or do it with somebody else. We’re the people that do all the things, every building, every article of clothing, every meal, every IV that goes into an arm, every pill that gets delivered, that gives relief to somebody, every blanket, every single thing you see, every book, was made by people just like you—another worker who deserves the full fruit of their labor.
And that means that we acknowledge that the police should no longer be allowed to have power over us. The landlord should no longer be allowed to have power over us. It’s time to be serious. And on that note, I ask everybody to remember what brother George Jackson, of the Black Panther Party, said. This is so important. We need to hold this in our hearts and act on it. In Rhode Island, there are probably dozens of revolutionary groups, small, working hard, and doing good work. Each one of us is committed to moving our class and liberation forward.
We have all these little, sectarian differences that sometimes divide us and keep us from organizing closely. George Jackson said it is time to put those quarrels aside. Fascism is already here; it’s been here forever, so now we have to be serious. If you’re a part of a revolutionary movement, I am calling on you to send your leaders and your members to meet in congress and organize to take power. Do not ask for reform or beg for relief, but take the things that belong to us back. Take back the land, take the bread, and we will make the peace.
The state and the city need to put justice at the heart of the economic development agenda.