Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday gathered in Milan, Italy, to protest the deployment of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents during the upcoming Winter Olympics, unbothered by that agents would be stationed in a control room and not operating on the streets.
The protest in Piazza XXV Aprile, a square named for the date of Italy’s liberation from Nazi fascism in 1945, drew people from the left-leaning Democratic Party, the Italian General Confederation of Labor and the National Association of Italian Partisans organizations that protect the memory of the country’s partisan resistance during World War II, along with many other people.
Organizers handed out plastic whistles, which people blew as music blared from a van. The protest was as much against the news that agents from a division of ICE would participate in security for the US delegation as against what many of those present said they saw as creeping fascism in the US.
Photo: AFP
“No thank you, from Minnesota to the world, at the side of anyone who fights for human rights,” read one banner. “Never again means never again for anyone,” read another, and “Ice only in Spritz,” a reference to a popular aperitif, read yet another.
The ICE agents to be deployed to Milan are not from the same unit as the immigration agents cracking down in Minnesota and other US cities.
News of the deployment of ICE agents has provoked a backlash in Italy.
Milan Mayor Giuseppe Sala has said they were not welcome.
Italian Minister Matteo Piantedosi has been called to the Italian parliament to testify about the deployment this week.
Protester Silvana Grassi held a sign that read “Ice = Gestapo.”
She said the scenes of ICE agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota, shooting and killing protesters and detaining children were deeply upsetting.
“It makes me want to cry to think of it,” Grassi said. “It’s too terrible. How did they elect such a terrible, evil man?”
US Homeland Security Investigations, an ICE unit that focuses on cross-border crimes, frequently sends its officers to overseas events such as the Olympics to assist with security. The ICE arm at the forefront of the immigration crackdown in the US is known as Enforcement and Removal Operations, and there is no indication its officers are being sent to Italy.
“Even if it’s not the same ones, we don’t want them here,” Grassi said.
Paolo Bortoletto, also holding a banner, was aware that the officers would have an investigative and not a street role.
Still, he said: “We don’t want them in our country. We are a peaceful country. We don’t want fascists. It’s their ideas that bother us.”
The Olympics begin on Friday with an opening ceremony that is expected to be attended by US Vice President J.D. Vance and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
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