A protest in front of the Wilson Building in January 2017. (Photo by Alex Edelman)

Hundreds of people will gather in Columbia Heights on Monday evening to protest reported ICE arrests of at least a dozen D.C. residents last week.

Reports of the arrests started trickling in at the end of last week, as residents phoned D.C.’s ICE rapid response hotline and called in ICE sightings to different advocacy networks, says Ben Beachy, a volunteer with the immigrant advocacy organization Sanctuary DMV. Beachy has spoken directly to half a dozen family members of people who were detained.

Four different enforcement actions have been reported, at least one of which was described by advocates as an “indiscriminate roundup” that included random passersby on the street.

ICE officers showed up at the Sarbin Towers apartment buildings on 16th Street NW in Mount Pleasant on Thursday night, according to advocates. Nine people were reportedly arrested in that enforcement action, some of whom live at Sarbin Towers and others of whom were just passing by on the street, Beachy says.

“What I’ve heard is that [ICE] may have gone there with a couple of people in mind, and then they didn’t find those people and just started asking random people for their papers,” Beachy says.

Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton released a statement Monday condemning the reported indiscriminate raids. “The reported ICE raids conducted last week in predominantly Latino D.C. neighborhoods signal that anyone on our streets could be arrested based on appearance, a danger to each and every D.C. resident,” Norton said.

ICE spokesperson Justine Whelan told DCist that officers routinely conduct targeted enforcement actions nationwide, but “ICE does not conduct indiscriminate raids or target individuals indiscriminately.” Whelan declined to comment specifically on the arrests made in D.C. last week.

In another incident, ICE officers reportedly entered a private residence near Georgia Ave. NW and detained two people. Beachy and other advocates allege that the arrest was conducted with the help of Metropolitan Police Department officers. In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for MPD denied the charge: “MPD does not inquire about immigration status, being that D.C. is a sanctuary city. With that said, to our knowledge MPD had no involvement in the alleged arrests you mentioned, and therefore has no information to provide.”

A man was also reportedly detained while he was eating dinner at a Columbia Heights restaurant on 14th Street Monday night, according to advocates. M. Lucero Ortiz, the director of legal services at immigrant legal services organization CARECEN, confirmed to Washington City Paper that her organization received a call about a fourth incident on Thursday night in Capitol Hill, though it’s unclear how many people were arrested there.

Those detained include people from Mexico and El Salvador, according to Omar Angel Perez, the lead organizer of DMV Sanctuary Congregation Network.

Now, several area immigrant advocacy organizations are holding a rally beginning at 5:30 p.m. Monday at the Columbia Heights plaza on 14th Street NW. Nearly 500 people have RSVPd on the Facebook event page, and nearly 900 are interested.

Beachy and Perez say advocates want ICE out of D.C., but they’re also asking for specific steps from the city government. They want Mayor Muriel Bowser to intervene when ICE arrests D.C. residents and demand their release; they want her to guarantee that they’re all given legal representation; they want more stringent sanctuary policies that would penalize any city employee who cooperates with ICE in making arrests; and they want District Attorney General Karl Racine to conduct an investigation into the alleged collaboration between MPD and ICE.

Immigration advocates have clashed with the Bowser Administration before over what they say are inadequate sanctuary policies (there is no one definition of what constitutes a sanctuary policy). D.C. policy since 1984 has been to prohibit D.C. police from asking about immigration status and limit cooperation with immigration authorities. This means MPD generally does not honor ICE detainers, or hold immigrants past their release date for ICE to pick them up (though there are exceptions). MPD does notify ICE when inmates are going to be released, however, enabling the agency to pick them up upon their release.

Bowser has repeated that D.C. will remain a sanctuary city, but advocates have often said her rhetoric lacks the power of other sanctuary city mayors. A week after election day, a group of protesters confronted her outside a Mount Pleasant library to demand that she be more forceful. After ICE arrested 14 residents in D.C. last October, advocates similarly criticized Bowser for a response that they say lacked urgency and concrete policy changes.

“We feel there is an escalation in ICE work in the DMV area. We have seen a series of detentions by ICE. The goal of the rally is to call publicly for the D.C. Council to stand up and intervene,” says Perez.

Adds Beachy: “It’s important to spotlight that there have been many different immigrant defense efforts that are an antidote to the hate. These [protests] are an exercise in human dignity.”