Last month, immigration activists took over the lobby of a downtown office

Published 7:00 am Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Last month, immigration activists took over the lobby of a downtown office building in the hope of getting arrested and drawing attention to their demands for immigration law reform. They had no luck. Police, having just been embarrassed by a video showing an officer threatening to “beat the Mexican piss” out of a Latino man, refused to make a single arrest. Today the activists are trying again. At 1 pm, a coalition led by the advocacy group OneAmerica is staging an event in front of the federal building. There will be speakers, musicians and other performers, according to OneAmerica spokesperson Charlie McAteer.Then, at 3:30, the civil disobedience will begin. McAteer says a break-off group of some 25 protestors will carry out “various moments of escalation”–one of them being the building of a fence in the middle of the street to symbolize the increasingly barricaded U.S.-Mexican border (see picture above). Literally, the activists intend to build a chain link fence, McAteer says. “We’re going to be there for as long as it takes [to get attention and get arrested],” he adds—-overnight if we have to.” Talk about bad timing. This incident comes on the heels of yet another and even more widely-publicized police video, this one showing a cop punching a girl for during a jaywalking stop. If the protesters are going to draw police into a confrontation now, that fence better be pretty high.