NEW YORK CITY, April 19—Recently, our church justice and peace community met to review our past several months’ work and to plan for our “spring offensive.” Those of us involved in the Sanctuary  movement attended a city-wide meeting to continue planning and organizing movements against racist ICE raids in our neighborhoods.
This month, Fascist-in-Chief Donald Trump Tweeted his opposition to a deal for DACA—Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. The program shields certain undocumented workers from deportation for two years, allowing them to get work permits.
While DACA itself was essentially a ploy by U.S. bosses for undocumented workers to serve their imperialist needs, even with the “protections” it offered, ICE officials have arrested DACA recipients before. The bosses will always break their own laws to keep workers in line and intimidated.
We are reaching out to houses of faith, community groups, workers, and small businesses (bodegas, barber shops, salons, and others that are part of the community). In order to fight back against ICE and growing fascism we must win workers to understand that all of us have the same needs and interests.
We must organize more and more workers to band together so that when ICE shows up in our neighborhoods, it will be clear that racism and fascism are not welcome! We are also celebrating the victory of one of our church members for whom we mobilized widely in and beyond church membership.
But more importantly, we must bring working-class people to understand that the only way to permanently end this terror is through communist revolution. Nothing less!
The other focus of our study-action group is the scourge of racist police terror-particularly against those who are suffering mental crises. Our main campaign in this regard is for Deborah Danner, a 66-year-old Black worker from the Bronx who coped with chronic schizophrenia most of her life. On October 18, 2016 a neighbor called the local precinct, asking that Danner be brought to a hospital after an acute psychotic episode. The Fire Department EMT’s who responded first were beginning to calm her sufficiently. Then Sergeant Hugh Barry came on the scene, confronted her, and within five minutes, claiming that she was threatening him with a bat, killed her with his service revolver, never even attempting to use the taser he had at hand.
This killing was so incredibly egregious even the mayor and police commissioner had to denounce it and suspended Sgt. Barry immediately.
The Bronx DA dragged his feet for months, but finally got the pig indicted and he stood trial before a judge last month. No surprise that Barry was acquitted! They brought in a judge from Westchester County who would face no political pressure from any Bronx constituents outraged by racist police. The judge also had worked for the same District Attorney’s office that had declined to prosecute the White Plains cop who had killed Kenneth Chamberlain a few years before under similar circumstances as Ms. Danner’s. The fix was obviously in from the start.
Several congregations mobilized to have a presence each day in court - we managed to bring fifteen over the course of the trial. Three of us joined in a militant action with several Black Lives Matter members outside the court house and the chief court cop ripped literature out of our hands. But the most important result is that we are now part of building a city-wide, anti racist movement to fight back against police killings, particularly of the mentally ill.
This ordeal shows that in “liberal” NYC, racist police terror is just as potent as any so-called “conservative” cities out there.
At our Thursday meeting we listed 18 congregations, community groups, professional associations and labor unions where we have ties. Our goal is to help lead hundreds, then thousands against this racist system, and to shut it down!!