Top: Scenes from a protest that members of Unidad Latina en Acción and the New Haven Peace Commission brought song, folk music, and poetry to. Bottom: Alex Charles, a social worker who came out for an art build and singing rehearsal hosted by Singing Resistance, the New Haven Immigrants Coalition, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Lucy Gellman Photos.
“Ring the bells that still can ring!” Clancy Emanuel sang, in a voice that came from deep in his belly. Around him, two dozen people anchored themselves to the floor, and began to sing the words back. “Forget your perfect offering!” The sound bloomed around them. “There is a crack in everything!” Within seconds, a rollicking call-and-response to Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” had reached the high, arched ceiling. “That’s how! The light! Gets in!”
That focus on artmaking as an integral part of resistance came to downtown New Haven, and then the city’s East Rock neighborhood, on Wednesday evening, as members of Unidad Latina en Acción, the New Haven Peace Commission, Singing Resistance New Haven, the New Haven Immigrants Coalition and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) came together over two separate events within two miles of each other.
First, ULA gathered people in a rally at City Hall, speakers pressed up against Ed Hamilton’s memorial of the Amistad Rebellion. Then, the organizing spirit travelled to Whitney Avenue, where Singing Resistance rehearses each week, and NHIC had joined for an art build.
Both responded to recent sweeps from Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Danbury and Bridgeport last week, during which ICE arrested and detained nearly 100 people, and left families shaken and traumatized on the first day of a new school year. Both events acknowledged the power of collecting artmaking as a way into organizing and activism.
Throughout, a refrain remained the same across languages and organizing tactics: solo el pueblo salva el pueblo—only the people can save the people.
“We have to speak every day, we have to organize every day,” said ULA Co-Founder John Jairo Lugo, surrounded by both immigrant families and ULA supporters who are U.S. citizens, many wearing masks and baseball caps to protect their identities. “Only the people can save the people. We don’t want solidarity alone.”
Solo El Pueblo Salva El Pueblo
Millie Grenough and Frank Panzarella, who both performed original songs, sit behind organizer John Lugo.
During the rally, Lugo called for stronger protections for immigrants in both New Haven, which maintains its status as a Sanctuary City, and across the state. In addition to a general strike, for which advocates in Danbury also called at a rally and march Wednesday night, Lugo also advocated for the creation of a $50 million state fund specifically for immigrant defense, and stronger enforcement of the Connecticut Trust Act.
The Trust Act prohibits municipal and state law enforcement officials from working with ICE. While it received expanded protections from the state legislature in 2025; Lugo painted that work as insufficient. He did not reference new state legislation limiting immigration enforcement officials that passed this year.
“If folks are being pursued [by ICE], they should be able to call 911!” Lugo said.
“De-Flock!” a woman in the crowd responded.
In addition, Lugo called for a comprehensive immigrant defense network, in which volunteer members—ideally citizens, like many of the people assembled Wednesday—can provide more immediate logistical support like rapid response, courthouse accompaniment, and contacting the press.
Lugo said that ULA is currently working with 40 families, many of which have at least one member facing final orders of deportation, or family members who are currently in immigration detention.
“It’s hard,” he said, pulling off to the side of the rally as he described days spent trying to help families in New Haven, Hamden, Waterbury, Danbury and Bridgeport. “Basically we’re in an emergency, always receiving new calls … every day. I would not be so frustrated if there was mass organizing, but people, they just want to live their normal lives until something happens.”
“It’s a hunting ground for ICE,” he added of Connecticut. It’s only a matter of time, he added, until “what happened in Danbury” happens in New Haven.
As he spoke, the very human stakes of his ask were clear: two little girls scurried around the Amistad statue, pausing only to look up at the different faces of Joseph Cinqué that populate three sides of the piece. Their mother is working with ULA to stay in this country, Lugo said.
Across from them, an attendee who asked not to be identified recalled his own arrest by ICE agents earlier this summer, when he was leaving a job site in Torrington. During the arrest, he said that agents threw him to the ground and pepper sprayed him, injuring his head and his arm in the process. He spent a month in detention in Massachusetts, adding that “it’s thanks to them [ULA] that I’m out.”
“The way they pick up people is very bad,” he said through an ULA member who translated. “When ICE, when they stop people and use force, it’s very bad. My hope is that all this ends.”
When she read about the murder of Renée Nicole Macklin Good in January, Grenough said, she couldn't stop thinking about Good's six-year-old son. It inspired her song, "That January Day."
Meanwhile it was artists, all members of the city’s Peace Commission, who sought to bring the message home in both poetry and song. Getting misty-eyed, Beaver Hills resident and longtime peacenik Millie Grenough introduced “That January Day,” written in honor of slain Minneapolis residents Alex Pretti and Renée Nicole Macklin Good. Pretti, a VA nurse, and Good, a mother, wife and poet, were both killed by ICE agents in January, during the agency’s occupation of the city.
Grenough, who is a stepmom to two now-adult sons, and “GrandMille” to a gaggle of grandchildren, told attendees that when she read about Good’s death, she couldn’t stop thinking about Good’s six-year-old son, whom she had dropped off at school shortly before she was stopped, shot and killed by ICE agents in the front seat of her car.
As she sang, voice rising and falling around Frank Panzarella’s guitar—”Doing my best to keep us warm / Don’t want anything to cause us harm / On this oh! So! Sunny! January day”—people joined in. At first, it was just a few voices, attendees swaying side to side and bobbing at the shoulders. Then, slowly, voices rose, some gravelly as others carried the tune forward.
It opened the door to poetry and music, from Paula Panzarella’s selection from April Lopez’ Nos Están Desapareciendo (We Have Been Disappeared) to an original folk ballad titled “We Can Do Better Than That” from her husband, Frank Panzarella. Even Lugo’s comments, focused on holding politicians to account, teetered on poetry until they flowed right into it, with Gioconda Belli’s 1978 poem “Huelga.”
Top: Paula Panzarella, a longtime peace activist in New Haven who read from April Lopez' collection, Nos Están Desapareciendo. Bottom: Manuel "Manny" Camacho, who recently became president of the city's Peace Commission and has also spoken openly about his lived experience as a Latino person in New Haven. "Every person in our community deserves to be treated with dignity," he said.
When the poem was written, Belli was a member of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, or the Sandinista National Liberation Front, and part of a group focused on unseating then-President Anastasio Somoza Debayle. Somoza Debayle, Lugo explained, ruled with a dictatorial approach—a political style for which his fiercest critic was gunned down in the streets.
In 1978, Belli’s poem, “Huelga,” both responded to and fueled calls for a nationwide strike that became reality in January 1979. As Lugo read the words, attendees seemed to lean in all at once, debating whether to take action.
“I’m just saying that we’re surrounded by all this crisis,” he said after finishing the piece.
Singing Down The Walls
Singing Resistance New Haven member Maz.
Less than two miles away, Emanuel walked into New Haven’s First Presbyterian Church, and took in the sanctuary as it began to fill with people. Around him, attendees set out food and stacked chairs, a well-rehearsed ballet. Someone set a gem-colored cucumber on a paper towel, with a note that it was free for the taking. Kirill Staklo and Phill Campbell, both organizers with PSL New Haven, trickled in with artmaking supplies, arranging tables across the room.
Emanuel, who has played music all his life but only recently started singing seriously, motioned for attendees to circle up, as they do every Wednesday. As over two dozen attendees planted their feet on the floor, spines straightened. Shoulders relaxed. Attendees let their heads hang loose and rolled their necks from side to side. As Emanuel walked them through warm-ups, breath filled the room. Before long, it had turned to humming.
Since early February, the group has met weekly to practice, mostly at First Presbyterian on Whitney Avenue. Lindsay, a co-founder who declined to give her last name, said that it grew out of both the traditions of resistance singers in Minneapolis, who began singing en masse during the ICE occupation of the city, and musicians who have used their voices to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.
“I’ve always found that music has helped me when I’ve been low,” she said. With fellow members like Emanuel, Emily (“I want to stick it to the man, but I want to stick it to the man for as long as possible,” she said when declining to give her last name), and Jo Wilber, she wants to pass that sense of hope on to fellow New Haveners.
Top: Emanuel, leading song. Bottom: Artist and psychologist Jen Carpenito, who heard about the event via social media and wanted to come out to support.
Wednesday, it seemed that everyone had come out for different reasons, all of them moved by the act of artmaking, and many ready to lift their voices in a week that was only halfway over, and already felt long. As she leaned over a length of white posterboard, Cindy Dodd said the group has been a balm for her during an emotionally exhausting time, as she cares for a husband who is in hospice care.
A soprano by training, Dodd has been part of church choirs throughout her life, and said she was grateful to find the group through a friend two months ago. When she does tune in to the news—which isn’t all that often—she’s shocked by the cruelty that she sees from the current administration, including and especially in the actions of ICE agents who tear families apart.
“There seems to be no compassion,” she said.
“I just needed a place to come to bring me joy and energy,” she added of the group. “I just get energy from this group that I can pass on.”
Attendee Mercedes Alicea.
Across the table from her, first-time attendee Mercedes Alicea made a gentle curve, designed as the right side of the Liberty Bell. Then she started in on the other side, making the same elongated S shape until the sides matched. The word L I B E R T Y cascaded down the side in blocky graphite letters, not yet colored in.
For Alicea, who grew up in Bridgeport, the work of Singing Resistance and the New Haven Immigrants Coalition feels personal. Her grandparents, including a grandmother after whom she is named, hail from Camuy, Puerto Rico. Her daughter’s great-grandfather, George Lima, Sr., was a Tuskegee Airman who grew up as the son of Cape Verdean immigrants. Those histories of migration and diaspora are part of her story.
“The only Latino that has American rights is the Puerto Rican … I think that’s just evil,” she said as she fussed with a small graphite circle that was supposed to be the handle at the top of the Liberty Bell. “It’s not right what ICE is doing. The Latino community … they work hard!”
“I love singing. I feel beautiful when I sing,” she added.
Dodd smiled at her as she cut out letters from an old magazine, to make a collage that read Melt / ICE / With / Love. “You breathe together,” she said. “Your hearts beat together.”
“It’s crazy! It’s really nice!” Alicea said. “I feel like we’re one.”
Top: Attendee Khal, who pointed to artmaking as a form of activism. "I wanted to remind myself of the power of the people and the community that's out here," they said. "This is what community means to me. If I beleive in a better world, this is what it looks like." Bottom: Mik Johnson, who shared that the event was part of a week of action geared toward resisting ICE in Connecticut.
Across the room, it seemed as if Emanuel had received an invisible cue. At every rehearsal, singers launch into the same song, “Sing Down The Walls” at 8 p.m. That’s because across the country, people gather at the same time to perform the song—written by the Peace Poets, with the words of children who ICE is holding at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Tex.—in their communities and outside of detention centers, to let the people inside know that they are not alone.
“I’ll sing from here / and you sing from there!” Emanuel started, with a call-and-response that filled the whole church with lush, layered a cappella sound. “Together, we’ll sing down the walls everywhere!”
“With love in our hearts / rising up like the sea—” he continued. Singers, some still hunched over their posterboards and paintbrushes, sang the words back to him. “Together, we’ll sing until everyone’s free!”
As he walked, a long drum strapped to his chest, voices rose and fell through the sanctuary, until every attendee had caught on. Some sat across the floor, legs stretched out or criss-crossed as they worked on signs that read ICE OUT!, Resist / Persist / Vote and Empathy Is American. Kate Cebik, the operations manager at MakeHaven, sat on the floor with an open box of charms, threading colorful stars that read “Fuck Ice” into dangly earrings.
Back in the center of the room, Emanuel switched to the Spanish translation of the song. In two weeks, the group plans to sing it during a visit from the Vermont-based social justice theater troupe Bread & Puppet Theater. They practice it each time they meet, to keep it fresh.
“Yo canto acá, y tú cantas allá /Y juntos los muros vamos a tumbar!” he sang, and again voices rose. “Con nuestro amor como olas del mar /Cantando llegamos a la libertad.”
Alyce Coleman, who has been with Singing Resistance from the jump.
For attendees like Alex Charles, it was a welcome interlude as he painted. As he listened, he leaned over an unfinished banner that read ICE Out of CT / No Migra En Nuestra Barrio, steadying a brush covered in glittering, thick black paint.
“Today I woke up, I was a little tired, but I wanted to make sure that I was giving back to the community,” he said. He leaned over the words Out Of. “I have cousins from Haiti, and they are fearing for their lives given the change in their status … It's very unfortunate.”
Charles, a Trumbull resident who grew up in Bridgeport and Waterbury before attending Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU), noted how overwhelming and cruel the administration’s actions toward immigrants can be. That’s both personal and not: he has cousins from Haiti who were covered by Temporary Protected Status (TPS) until July of this year, when the Trump Administration revoked it.
He has one cousin who calls twice a day, once in the morning and once at night. Charles’ father prays with him over the phone, usually for around 15 minutes. Charles sees firsthand how painful the process is for not just his cousins risking deportation, but his whole family.
Nearby, Singing Resistance member Maz filled in big, bubble letters across her sign that read Resist / Love / One / Another. A New Havener since 1972, she said that she’s been horrified by the violence that she’s seeing in the news, but doesn’t always have the physical ability to stand or march at rallies that stretch on for hours on end. The group gives her a way to connect with other activists.
“The singing, it gives me something that I can do rather than just sit there and feel helpless,” she said.
“The recent motivating factor is obviously what’s happening in Connecticut,” added a singer next to her who asked not to be identified. “I think the way we’re treating immigration—it just enrages me.”
On the other side of the sanctuary, Emanuel burst into song, with a mellifluous chant of “There is work to be done! There is work to be done! With these hands, this heart, this mind!” that was contagious. Voices swirled through the church, splitting into spontaneous harmonies thanks to members like Deirdre Dolan, who later joked that she can’t sing melody even if she tries.
Staklo, a longtime organizer with both the PSL and New Haven Immigrants Coalition, later suggested using the song as a bridge into Florence Reece’s “Which Side Are You On,” a ballad that has flowed through union organizing movements, civil rights marches and anti-war protests for nearly a century.
As Emanuel considered it, quietly singing the lyrics alongside Staklo, a cry-turned-song of “Abolish ICE! Abolish ICE! Abolish ICE right now / right now” erupted from the front of the room, where Emily sat surrounded by lengths of white and brown posterboard. Campbell, who had been taking video of the banner as the words materialized across the front, stepped back for a moment to soak in the sound.
“An event like today’s is kind of a stepping stone for people to come together,” he said, outlining a week of action that included a Thursday evening art build, Friday information session, and Saturday afternoon demonstration on the New Haven Green. “I’m trained as a journalist, which means I’m constantly going to my community members and hearing from them. At a time like this, we see voices crying out from Bridgeport and Danbury.”
“This kind of action is an extension of that work,” he added. As a journalist and an artist, “I have to be involved. I have to pick a side.”