Arizona Anti-Deportation Activists Enter Second Week Of Hunger Strike

Six activists in Phoenix, Arizona entered the second week of a planned 14-day hunger strike on Monday in front of the Phoenix offices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), calling for the release of family members being held by ICE in nearby Eloy Detention Center. The hunger-strikers and their supporters say they’re seeking to call attention to the human cost of continued deportations of undocumented immigrants, which have risen to an average of 1,100 per day under the Obama administration.

Carlos García, director of Puente Movement, a Phoenix-based migrant- and civil-rights group which has lent its support to the six strikers, told Animal Politico on Monday that his group has using social media to urge supporters to call into the Phoenix ICE offices to demand the release of the strikers’ family members. “We’ve seen how this situation responds to political questions, how with some noise, some pressure, other people have been released from the Eloy detention center,” he said. “That’s why these people are staging the hunger strike, so that their loved ones aren’t deported and separated from their families.”

One of the strikers, Anselma Lopez, told VOXXI last week that her 30-year-old son Elder, the father of two US citizen children, has spent almost three years in the Eloy center after being arrested while at work at a McDonald’s. “I’m fasting for my grandchildren as well because if my son gets deported, they won’t be able to see him again,” she said. Elder is one of six detainees who are also taking part in the hunger strike from inside Eloy.

ThinkProgress reported at the end of last week that the hunger strikers said they had been the target of racially-motivated abuse from passersby who pulled up alongside their encampment and threw a wrapped burrito with the words “Learn English wetback. Go back to Mexico” scrawled on it.