Thomas Breen photo
Protesters outside 121 Elm St. Monday afternoon. Below: Kica Matos and Miguel Castro.
Dozens of Wilbur Cross High School students and local immigrant rights activists rallied outside a downtown courthouse, and inside City Hall, in support of an 18-year-old classmate who’s been detained outside Boston for over 100 days and is facing deportation.
That rally took place Monday afternoon on the steps of the state courthouse at 121 Elm St.
Emceed by Connecticut Students for a Dream organizers Eric Cruz Lopez and Anthony Barroso and propelled by chants of “No fear / No hate / No ICE in my state” and “Hey hey / Ho ho / Detention centers have got to go!”, the rally called for the release of Mario Aguilar Castañon.
The protesters later marched to City Hall, where they continued their demonstration and wrote cards and letters of support to their detained classmate.
Castañon, a junior at Wilbur Cross, was arrested and detained by federal Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) officials in September while contesting drunk driving charges at the Milford Superior Court.
For the past three-plus months, he’s been held in the Bristol County federal immigration detention facility in North Falmouth, MA while his attorneys from the New Haven Legal Assistance Association (NHLAA) petition for his asylum on the grounds that he would be in physical danger if he was returned to his birth country of Guatemala.
“Mario is not and has never been a danger to anyone,” said one of Castañon’s attorneys, Ben Haldeman, at Monday’s rally. “He likes video games and funny memes and learning about trees and planets.
“He came thousands of miles to this country so he could continue his education without the constant fear of being threatened and beaten and killed by gangs in his home country.”
Haldeman said Castañon is still waiting for a written judgment to be issued by the federal immigration judge presiding over his asylum case. He said Castañon’s most recent hearing was on Dec. 12, and that he is still locked up in a facility where he shared a giant warehouse of a room with 60 other inmates.
Monday’s rally was less about the details of Castañon’s case and more about the moral outrage felt by Wilbur Cross students, immigrant rights activists, and local elected officials that an apparently harmless teenager has been detained for over 100 days and is on the brink of deportation from the country he’s called home for over two years.
“One of our students is gone,” Wilbur Cross Principal Edith Johnson (pictured) said. “We want him back.”
Wilbur Cross is a school filled with immigrant students, Johnson said. It is a safe and supportive place for those students, and Castañon should be returned to the diverse peer group that is his community.
“It is my hope, my holiday prayer, that he will come back to us,” she said.
Mayor-Elect Justin Elicker (pictured) agreed. “This is Mario’s home,” he said about New Haven.
“New Haven has always been a place that welcomes people from all backgrounds, and needs to continue to do so.”
He pledged that, when he takes office in January, he will maintain the current executive order prohibiting city employees from asking victims about their immigration status. He said he will also sign a sanctuary city law into effect if the Board of Alders passes one.
Mayor Toni Harp (pictured) stressed her own outrage at Castañon’s detention once the protest made its way to the second floor atrium of City Hall.
“Are we so vindictive, petty, and eager to punish that we incarcerate a teenager for what amounts to an administrative matter?” she asked. “How has an immigration offense become a criminal matter where Mario’s being held without bond? I find this excessive. I find this behavior deplorable. And I find it troubling that more people are not outraged by it.”
Barroso and Cruz Lopez (pictured) said that, as undocumented immigrants themselves, they have both experienced first hand the anxiety and fear and pain of the threat of deportation.
“We have to unite and fight together because, if we’re doing this alone, we’re all gonna get lost in the system,” Barroso said. “We will not stop fighting until Mario’s release from detention, until everyone’s free, not only from detention, but from all mass incarceration because the system is very flawed.”
“All of you are my people,” said Cruz Lopez. “All of you are my community.”
“We’re gonna keep fighting for this,” he continued, “because we need our community to feel safe.”
Click on the Facebook Live videos below to watch parts of Monday’s rally.