About 200 Long Island faith leaders, elected officials and citizens gathered Thursday evening by the Glen Street Long Island Rail Road station in Glen Cove to protest the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration enforcement policies.
Joseph Varone, of West Hempstead, said he attended the protest to serve himself up as a reminder to other Long Islanders of their immigrant origins.
“My family came here from Greece and Turkey. My grandmother was a maid at the old Garden City Hotel. My other grandmother worked in a factory, day and night, making clothes in the city, in the sweatshops. And too many of us have forgotten our roots, and everybody is of value, every single person, and that’s why I’m here,” Varone told Newsday.
“What’s happening now is horrendous,” he added. “It’s fascism beyond belief. And I see families being torn apart, fathers being ripped apart, people who are working in stores, working on roofs, people gardening. These aren’t criminals. These people who came here for the same American dream we came for.”
Protesters sang along with an acoustic guitarist playing “We Shall Overcome” and held signs, including several that said “We Stand With Our Immigrant Neighbors.”
Since returning to the White House, President Donald Trump has dedicated $150 billion in federal funding to enforcement and border security, most recently targeting cities with Democratic leaders for crackdowns on immigrants in the country illegally.
Some Long Island officials have shown themselves to be strong supporters of the Trump administration’s immigration policies. Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman entered into an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to allocate 50 local jail cells to hold people arrested on immigration charges.
As of August, 1,600 people with prior criminal convictions had been picked up by ICE agents in Nassau County.
Bruce Castellano, a retired Mineola High school teacher who lives in Sea Cliff, said Trump’s immigration policies are felt far beyond those being targeted for deportation.
“I think that what’s going on now is devastating, not only for the people directly involved, but there’s a trickle-down effect. It affects everybody. There’s fear. There’s very strong fear, not just in Glen Cove, but throughout the country,” Castellano said.
Said state Assemb. Charles Lavine (D-Glen Cove), who attended the protest, in an interview with Newsday afterward: “Treating people like commodities is dehumanizing. And that’s what’s happened here, grabbing people, sending people who escaped fascist countries back to those countries to certain death … That is not the American dream.
“The promise was that Trump will isolate and get rid of the worst of the worst,” he added. “Well, everybody’s in favor of that. Even the immigrant community is in favor of that, whether they’re immigrants or nonimmigrants.”
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