San Jose residents protest construction site of Gilroy detention center

San Jose, CA – On June 14. around 300 protestors hit the streets in San Jose to protest against ICE’s plans to open a detention and processing center in the southern part of Santa Clara County near Gilroy, California. At around a million residents, San Jose is the largest city in Santa Clara County, one of the nine counties of the San Francisco Bay Area. Local activists say the detention center will impact all Bay Area residents.

ICE’s plans to build a detention center in Gilroy began circulating amongst the San Francisco Bay Area residents earlier this year. Now that blueprints of the facility have come out, confirming that the 20,000 square foot facility will have the capability to hold detainees, local organizations are mobilizing to hit the streets and protest the construction site.

Huy Tran of the Services, Immigrant Rights, and Education Network warned, “The expanded facilities here in Gilroy are going to make ICE a worse threat by providing more holding cells and training more ICE agents to attack us.”

The construction of the Gilroy detention center comes at a time when detainees are launching hunger strikes in Delaney and Adelanto detention centers, in New Jersey and California.

Uriel Magdaleno of Community Service Organization San Jose condemned the conditions of the centers. “The Legalization for All network stands in unwavering solidarity with the hunger strikes,” stated Magdaleno. In the past year, there have been over 50 detainees’ deaths confirmed.

Magdaleno continued, “Conditions inside these facilities worsen daily, people are denied basic human rights.”

The day before the protest, Community Service Organization Oakland participated in a car caravan to California City in coordination with the Legalization for All network’s weekend of action against detention centers. At the Gilroy protest, Danny Celaya with CSO Oakland spoke to attendees about the previous day’s caravan.

“The conditions there [in California City detention center] are grotesque, inhumane and reports of guards dehumanizing detainees as dogs,” stated Celaya. “We need to continue to fight for immigrant rights and say down with detention centers.”

The protesters marched to the detention center construction site in Gilroy with banners that read “Stop ICE’s detention centers,” “Legalization for all,” and “Free Guillermo now,” referring to local community member Guillermo Medina Reyes who has been in detention since February of this year. The march concluded with a rally where Rebeca Armendariz of Community Agency for Resources Advocacy and Services stated, “We will be back.”

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