WASHINGTON, DC — Police arrested 16 protesters yesterday, August 5, after they unfurled banners showing portraits of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) victims on the marble floor of the Hart Senate Office Building, according to a statement from Women’s March.
The demonstrators, members of the Women’s March advocacy group, staged a “die-in” while holding banners designed to resemble tombstones for people who were killed by ICE agents or died in ICE custody. According to the group, they had gathered to call out senators who financed ICE’s violence and were preparing to leave Washington for the August recess.
Capitol Police had not responded to Hyperallergic’s inquiries about the arrests or any charges at the time of publication. The banners included hand-drawn illustrations by Italian artist Gianluca Costantini depicting the faces of Alex Pretti, Renée Good, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Ruben Ray Martinez, Ryan Carol Kidd, Jonah Neal, Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, and two other unidentified individuals.
Displayed in uneven rows like gravestones, the portraits included the subjects’ names and the month and date of their deaths, along with the words “Killed by I.C.E.” “My drawings portray people who died in ICE custody not as numbers or headlines, but as individual lives: faces, bodies, families, and stories that deserve to be remembered,” Costantini wrote in an email to Hyperallergic.
Women’s March has spent the past year running campaigns that directly call out and appeal to ICE agents. “Women’s March is in this fight because ICE’s violence doesn’t end with the people it detains or kills. Women are left to carry the wreckage, for their families, their communities, and each other,” the group’s executive director, Rachel O’Leary Carmona, said in the press release.
Costantini has long worked with advocacy organizations around the world, including ActionAid, Amnesty International, and Words Without Borders. He was accused of terrorism by the Turkish government in 2016 because of his resistance art and is best known for a controversial short comic he made about the Charlie Hebdo shooting attack.
Shortly after the banners were displayed on Wednesday, police seized and crumpled them, then arrested the protesters, who were zip-tied, escorted out of the building, and placed in police vans. Women’s March protesters also unfurled black-and-white banners from upper-level balconies reading “ICE Kills” and “Abolish ICE,” as well as another banner listing the names and numbers of people who have been murdered by ICE or died in ICE custody — at least 54 total since Trump took office for his second term.
The protesters had revised the figures, crossing them out with red paint, to reflect the higher count as more information has emerged. Although protesting in the Capitol or congressional buildings is illegal under D.C. Code § 10-503.16 and federal regulations, Costantini said it is important to force political representatives to confront the consequences of their policies. “Behind words such as ‘enforcement’ and ‘detention’ are people separated from their loved ones, abused, neglected, and killed,” Constantini told Hyperallergic. “Art can make visible what institutions try to turn into something abstract or invisible.”
