Andrew Rice tries to channel John Lennon, whose 1969 "Give Peace A Chance" became an anti-war anthem.
Andrew Rice looked out over the New Haven Green, taking in the hundreds of faces in front of him. Study History, read one sign that bobbed over the crowd with bolded blue capital letters. Show Common Decency, read another. Behind him, a row of open umbrellas, vibrantly painted and pointed out towards the crowd, materialized in the Green’s empty fountain. Against the slate-colored sky, an upside-down American flag caught in a gust of wind and billowed for a moment.
All we are saying, Rice sang, his voice shaking but clear, Is give peace a chance. By the second refrain, over 100 voices had joined in.
Artists, activists, immigrant rights advocates and organizers came together Sunday afternoon for “ICE Out For Good,” a rally and gathering that was part of a national day of action grieving the death of Renee Nicole Good at the hands of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Minneapolis, Minn. last week. Organized by the national group 50501 , the gathering became a call to action amidst escalating violence from ICE agents, directed at both immigrants and U.S. citizens.
It struck a particular chord in downtown New Haven, where ICE arrested three immigrants last Thursday. Local partners included Unidad Latina en Acción (ULA), the New Haven Federation of Teachers (NHFT), Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS), and Greater Westville Indivisible.
Good, an artist and activist who the Academy of American Poets recognized for her poem “On Learning To Dissect Fetal Pigs” in 2020, was a wife and mother of three whose spouse, Becca Good, has said that she was so radiant that she “literally sparkled.” The ICE agent who shot Good has since been identified as Jonathan Ross. In photos of her car, two stuffed animals peek out of the glovebox that is now beside a blood-stained airbag.
Matos, who is also a founding member of the bomba group Proyecto Cimarron. "We don't want you in our streets, we don't want you in our hospitals, we don't want you in our courtrooms, and we do not want you in our community," she said of ICE.
“None of this is normal,” said longtime organizer and human rights champion Kica Matos, now president of the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) and the Immigrant Justice Fund (IJF). She took a moment to acknowledge the 32 known people who have died in ICE custody in the last year alone, victims of a machine that has deported over 500,000 immigrants since January 2025. “Let me say it again. This is not normal.”
“What we are witnessing is authoritarianism and it is being built on the backs of immigrants,” she continued. “Renee’s brutal murder is a sign that this administration’s violence and lawlessness has now extended beyond immigrants. You know why that is? That is because authoritarianism never stops at its first target.”
Sunday, many of the attendees wove artmaking through their calls for social justice and legislative action, including a request to Gov. Ned Lamont to limit the use of the National Guard in the state. At the upper edge of the New Haven Green, Westvillians Jim Berger and Bob Beech welcomed attendees with a trombone and french horn, their eyes fixed on the low-hanging sky as they played Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.”
Top: Bob Beech and James (Jim) Berger. Bottom: Organizers help light candles for the people who have died in ICE custody, and as a result of ICE violence, in the last year.
“I guess I felt that we need music for these things,” said Berger, a senior lecturer in English and American studies at Yale who also plays with the Nu Haven Kapelye. After he started bringing his trombone out to protests last year, he built a set list of songs that have been particularly meaningful in the rich and long history of American protest movements. When he puts out the call before a protest, a handful of musicians usually show up to play.
Sunday, songs included anthems like “We Shall Not Be Moved,” “We Shall Overcome,” “Solidarity Forever,” “If I Had A Hammer,” and Billy Taylor’s 1963 “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free,” best known for the version sung by the singular Nina Simone. Berger announced the last with a sort of bashful pause, noting that his horn was no match for Simone’s full-hearted take on the song.
While he can appreciate a good chant, he added, there’s something unique about live music; it’s the reason that artists have been targeted and muzzled for centuries, including in the past year. “This is soul,” he said before launching into a brassy version of “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” with Beech.
As he lifted his trombone and began to play, decades of history fell away and spilled out over the Green, a ribbon of sound that has flowed from Mahalia Jackson to Mavis Staples to Pete Seeger to Sweet Honey in the Rock. Beech joined in, the horn weaving in and out of the trombone as it glinted in the sunlight.
Closer to the Green’s flagpole, Tina Santoni lined up members of the nascent “Umbrella Brigade,” a group of New Haveners who gather at her Westville home to make protest art—including a fleet of brilliantly painted umbrellas—every few weeks. After making her first umbrella before New Haven’s “No Kings” protest in June of last year, Santoni started thinking about the power that public art has to engage people and spark dialogue. She hasn’t stopped since.
“Sad!” she said quickly when asked how she had been feeling for the past weeks, and particularly since Good’s murder at the hands of federal law enforcement. “But it is balanced by us coming together.” She explained that Sunday’s rally marked the most recent of the brigade’s appearances: sometimes members gather silently on street corners with their opened umbrellas, letting the messages speak for themselves. On a recent afternoon, they gathered at the corner of Whitney and Trumbull as cars trundled by.
Sunday the umbrellas spoke loudly and clearly, gem-toned and bright beneath a wide, gray sky, creeping cold and raggedy tangle of branches left by the city’s Christmas tree. As speakers took the mic one by one, 20 umbrellas filled in the empty fountain behind them, with hand-painted slogans like Stop the bully in chief/Resist/Resist/Insist! and Stop the killing/Not in our name! Around the words, hand-painted designs of doves and crossed-out crowns took flight.
Wives Barb and Robin Levine-Ritterman, who live in Westville and are members of the brigade, said afterwards that they see it as a way to raise their voices, particularly at a time when speaking out is not always safe for non-citizens, regardless of documentation status. As Jews, mothers, and members of the LGBTQ+ community, “we have to speak out for those who can’t,” Barb said. They’ve seen how authoritarianism works. There’s just not another option.
Barb and Robin Levine-Ritterman.
As she spoke, Barb opened her umbrella, a design split into quarters from which four vibrant faces looked back. The words Standing Together For Peace & Justice danced along the outside. Standing beside her, Robin explained that the piece came from the reconstructionist synagogue Temple Beth Israel (TBI) in Eugene, Ore., where artist and congregant Judith Hankin came up with the original design.
The artwork made its way to the Levine-Ritterman household a few months ago, after TBI’s Racial Justice Committee reproduced the design as a fundraiser “to support our Racial Justice/Anti-Racism work and scholarship fund,” and member Tova Stabin gifted one to Robin for her birthday. Reached by text Monday, Stabin added that the fundraiser is still active; New Haveners are welcome to order umbrellas but should factor in the cost of postage.
Robin later showed off a design that she’d completed on a recent evening at Santoni’s house, with an old purple umbrella and some gray, blue, pink and white paint. On the brilliant nylon of her umbrella, she had painted the words Love America / Defend Democracy, the letters bolded and outlined to make them pop.
“We all think about what we would have done during the Holocaust,” she said, agreeing with this reporter that there are historic parallels to the last days of the Weimar Republic that feel increasingly and eerily similar. “It’s to encourage people to speak out.”
“Solidarity Is Not A Slogan”
The Rev. Ally Brundige. "God of justice, trouble the waters so that evil everywhere will know that you stand with your children who walk in the ways of love and peace and justice," she later prayed. "Let your justice roll down like waters, bringing down the violence, bringing down the injustice, bringing down the racism of our age. And fill us with courage. Fill us with courage and knowledge that together, and with you, nothing can stop us. And we won't stop, until fear is out of Connecticut. Until hate is out of Connecticut."
Meanwhile, speakers urged attendees to donate their time, space, and financial resources to immigrants, including the hundreds of families that have been impacted in New Haven and Connecticut since President Donald Trump took office a year ago. Many, from faith leaders to teachers to refugees, noted the power of collective action, working class solidarity and civil disobedience in the face of ICE’s $74.85 billion annual budget, and the culture of fear and violence that it often creates.
Or as Matos said early in the speaking lineup, “Solidarity is not a slogan. It is our responsibility.”
“We grieve with the families of the fallen, and yet our grief and our prayers are not enough,” said Rev. Ally Brundige, a new priest associate at Trinity Episcopal Church on the Green, after leading the crowd in “Everybody Wants Freedom,” popularized during civil rights marches in the 1960s, in both English and Spanish. “We must act. We must commit ourselves, our time, our voices, our funds, our bodies, to stand between those who would do us harm, who would do our neighbors harm, and say, ‘No’ to fear. ‘No’ to racism. ‘No’ to violence. ‘No’ to ICE.”
What that looks like in day-to-day life, she and others added, is court accompaniments, direct financial assistance to immigrant-led groups like ULA and the New Haven Immigrants Coalition, emergency food assistance for families who may be afraid to leave their homes, vigilance on a community level. Like Matos, she urged attendees not to be silent, but to trust in the divinity of their courage. As if on cue, Rice pointed out a tent where people could pick up their own whistles, used as a way to warn people of ICE’s presence in a neighborhood.
Until last year, the U.S. State Department required that resettlement agencies receiving federal funding provide a hot, ready-to-eat and culturally appropriate meal for refugee families. As Trump slashed aid to resettlement agencies and overhauled resettlement efforts themselves last year, that rule quietly disappeared. So too did the numbers of refugees, international parolees and asylum seekers able to enter the country.
But at the time, Rohbar, alone with her mother, brother, and sisters, remembered how meaningful and welcoming a gesture it was. The meal was there “simply to make us feel seen and safe,” she said, and for a moment it seemed as though she might cry. She took a beat, and pressed forward, looking over the crowd. A sign that read Over a million Americans have died defending our Democracy/Are we going to let one man destroy it? looked back.
Refugees like her, she continued, are subject to an extensive vetting process before they ever reach the United States. They have “followed every rule,” dotted every I and crossed every T to make their ways through miles of logistical red tape. And yet suddenly, many who have passed through the vetting process are now stuck in immigration limbo, no longer certain where they and their families will go.
Many of them have spent years fearing for their lives, and have again been rendered stateless by this decision, Rohbar noted. It’s one of the reasons she encourages people to do IRIS’ Run for Refugees each February. This year, as the organization struggles to stay afloat—and for the first time in decades, is not welcoming new refugees with the federal government—that ask feels particularly urgent, she said.
Top: Blatteau. Bottom: Rosa, an organizer with ULA who spoke passionately about how closely intertwined anti-racism, anti-militarism, and working class solidarity all are.
Leslie Blatteau, president of the New Haven Federation of Teachers, echoed that call for support as the rally neared its end. Speaking against a candy-colored backdrop of umbrellas, she reminded attendees of the need to protect their friends, neighbors, and fellow community members in the long weeks and months ahead. At this point, she said, it’s a matter of survival—a message that resonates for her not only as a union organizer, but also as a mother and educator.
Blatteau, with New Haven Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Madeline Negrón, has vowed that New Haven’s teachers and schools will work together to protect its students from ICE, a promise that she doubled down on last summer, as students, teachers and organizers fought alongside a legal team to get Esdrás Zabaleta-Ramirez, a rising junior at Wilbur Cross High School, home after he was arrested in a workplace raid last summer. .
“Secret police have no place in the streets and neighborhoods of a democracy,” Blatteau said. Behind her, the umbrellas bounced; a drum rumbled from somewhere in the crowd. “The money they spend on naked federal agents, on armored vehicles, on helicopters landing on apartment buildings, on tear gas, and raids, and weapons, the more they spend, the more likely the violence and the terror will continue.”