For Immediate Release
Metro DC DSA Denounces ICE Harassment of Member in Northwest Washington, DC
Date: August 21, 2025
Media Contact: For all press inquiries, please contact media@mdcdsa.org.
WASHINGTON, DC–Earlier this week, DC police collaborating with ICE agents stopped a
longtime Metro DC DSA member while he was driving his work vehicle in northwest DC. Falsely
claiming the stop was for a vehicle violation, the police racially profiled our member and his
colleague, both of whom are Latino landscape workers. They ripped the colleague out of the
vehicle and tackled him to the ground, eventually handing him over to ICE, where he remains in
custody. A bystander who filmed the incident was also arrested. Our member, a US citizen,
briefly filmed the encounter before being handcuffed and eventually released.
Metro DC DSA declares full solidarity with our member, his colleague, and everyone who is
under attack from this fascist administration.
The occupation of DC has nothing to do with keeping our city safe. It’s a spectacle intended to
obscure the fact that Trump and his local collaborators are destroying the programs working
class people depend on to survive – all for the sake of enriching oligarchs who profit from our
suffering. This is a brutal class war on working people waged by the rich and their political
puppets.
The law will not protect us. We know that from this most recent outrage, as well as the long
history of state brutality in communities across the USA. Rights are meaningless without a
strong political movement to give them substance. Our safety as a community depends above
all on our ability to organize and build solidarity. Our solidarity especially extends to our
immigrant neighbors, who are an essential part of our collective working class family. We call for
the abolition of ICE. We call on everyone to actively join the movement to end the occupation of
DC, the condition of DC statelessness that enables it, and the predatory capitalist system that
underpins them both.
DC, like the DMV as a whole, is a proud community with a rich history of struggle. Across DC,
our people are bravely standing up to the regime forces that would like to terrorize us into
silence. The occupation never stood a chance of succeeding. And the community’s response
shows that it has already failed.
We in Metro DC DSA love our members, our neighbors, and our city. We will defend them with
everything we have, and we will win.