June 28, 2018: End the Contract with ICE Campaign Begins in Grand Rapids

By Jeff Smith

On Thursday, June 28th, 2018, roughly 250 people showed up to the Kent County Commission meeting, a turnout that is rarely seen at such meetings. People with Movimiento Cosecha and Grand Rapids rapid response to ICE had been planning for months to attend the commission meeting and demand that they end the contract between ICE and the Kent County Sheriff’s Department.

Organizers waited until the Public Comment period of the commission meeting and after a few people spoke, a few dozen people occupied the space in the commission chambers, where the Kent County Commissioners sat during the meetings. Some people unfurled a large banner that read, “Kent County Separates Families, End the Contract!”

Photo taken at the Movimiento Cosecha-led protest to take over the Kent County Commission meeting. Source: Jeff Smith

Most of the Kent County Commissioners got up and left the meeting, with a just a few of them remaining. The End the Contract campaign organizers asked people to come to the podium and have a People’s Hearing, where dozens of people, primarily those impacted by ICE violence, spoke about the fear they experienced, fear of arrest, fear of detention, and fear of deportation. For more than an hour the People’s Hearing was conducted, essentially taking over the Kent County Commission meeting. 

This was the first action taken in the End the Contract Campaign, which lasted until the following year, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement decided to end their contract with the Kent County Sheriff’s Department, primarily because of all the negative and national press generated from the protests and the abusive actions of ICE and cops in Grand Rapids. 

It should be noted that neither the Kent County Commission nor the Sheriff’s Department called for an end to the ICE contract. In fact, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), is the entity that ended the contract with Kent County, primarily because of how much media attention the End of Contract campaign was getting. The amount of attention was two fold. First, the 14-month efforts of Movimiento Cosecha and Grand Rapids response to ICE engaged in numerous direct actions that not only confronted Kent County officials, it engaged the public and generated a tremendous amount of media attention. Second, when an off-duty GRPD Captain contacted ICE about a former US Marine, whom the cop thought was an undocumented immigrant, the national media began to pay attention to the absurdity and immorality of the racist profiling of immigrants. Thus, ICE ended their contract with Kent County in September of 2019.

Learn more in Chapter 9 from A People’s History of Grand Rapids by Jeff Smith.

This This Day in History post was written by Jeff Smith, author of A People’s History of Grand Rapids. Smith has been part of social movement work for more than four decades in Grand Rapids. He co-founded the Koinonia House, which practiced radical hospitality for the unhoused and was a Sanctuary for Central American refugees fleeing U.S.-sponsored terrorism in the 1980s. Smith spent a significant amount of time doing accompaniment work in Central America and Mexico, working with and learning from movement organizers in those countries. He started the Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy in 1998 and the Grand Rapids People’s History Project in 2010.