Eight arrested at “Evict ICE from 250 Delaware” protest
Subtitle: Protesters call for Uniland Development not to renew ICE’s lease
Photo Courtesy of Tito Ruiz- TRu iNk Media
On the evening of Saturday, Sept. 26, organizers with “Evict ICE from 250 Delaware” and over 100 Western New Yorkers met at the Delaware North Building in Buffalo, NY, according to a press release issued by the campaign.
According to their website, Evict ICE is a coalition of Buffalo activists joined by numerous local and statewide partners pushing for Uniland Development Company—the owner of the Delaware North Building—not to renew their lease with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which expires on Mar. 31, 2027.
Currently, ICE uses their Delaware North offices to coordinate deportation operations across New York State and outside of New York City. They also operate as “‘short term’ holding facilities” that lack beds, have seen overcrowding on several occasions, and have seen repeated violations of ICE’s own policies regarding the length of time people are allowed to be held in these cells, according to Evict ICE.
During Saturday’s action, the building was symbolically renamed the “Montante Detention Center,” a reference to the Montante family who owns Uniland Development and makes over two million dollars a year from ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in rent, as per Evict ICE.
According to Evict ICE’s press release, “[t]he ceremony was intended to call attention to the Montante family’s continued profiteering from deportation, as well as ICE’s continued presence on the building’s seventh and eighth floors. Uniland touts the building as emblematic of Buffalo’s so-called resurgence; for many families, however, it represents pain, trauma, and, from
the campaign’s perspective, domestic terrorism.”
Following the renaming ceremony, organizers and attendees—supported by a team of safety marshals—walked into the intersection of Delaware Ave. and West Chippewa St., shutting the street down and blocking traffic , while marching and chanting calls for ICE to get out of Buffalo, according to local resident Daniel Whalen, who attended Saturday’s action and provided an eyewitness account of the protest on Instagram.
Kelli Grabowski, one of the bike marshals in attendance, informed The Lamron that the marshals were there to block traffic and protect protesters in the street from vehicles, explaining, “I felt very serious about keeping vehicles, counter protesters, and police away from the marchers and banner holders in our rally.” As Grabowski stated, the “[p]rotesters were happy and passionate. They seemed to appreciate the extra layer of protection. They were also supportive. There were some hecklers on my side of the event, and when approached, multiple protesters rushed to stand beside me. We keep us safe.”
As stated by Whalen, it took “45 minutes for a single cop to show up,” who began to slowly shut down all four streets leading to the intersection. According to Grabowski, both police and counter protesters respected the barricade that was made, and “the marchers and the protesters that displayed the banners all stayed safe from potential oncoming traffic and hecklers.”
Karra, one of the initial six protesters willing to risk arrest also spoke with The Lamron, explaining that the purpose of their acts of civil disobedience “was to highlight the Montante Family, on the one hand claiming to uphold Jesuit values, you know at places like Canisius University, when at the same time they allow masked goons to abduct our neighbors, and profit off of that. Also, yeah, as an escalation of the campaign surrounding their lack of response. They have not responded publicly to the campaign even though they are aware of it. Like I have personally sent letters to those people’s houses, and you know they’ve had emails and all the rest of it. So it’s to get them to answer the demand of the campaign which is to refuse to renew ICE’s lease.”
As Whalen explained, the police left the crowd alone until around 7:30 p.m. when the police made an announcement that in two minutes anyone still in the street would be arrested on charges of disorderly conduct, though it was only after multiple announcements they actually moved in to make arrests. By this point, the marshals had instructed everyone wishing to avoid arrest to move onto the sidewalks, according to Grabowski.
Karra described being pleasantly surprised when a seventh person—an attendee at the protest not with the group willing to risk arrest—joined the other six in sitting down in the intersection just before the arrests were made. An eighth person—one of the organizers who had been shouting chants with a megaphone during the protest—was arrested by police on the sidewalk. Karra believed that they wanted to “make an example out of the person they perceived to be the leader.”
Karra described the experience of being arrested as a very transcendent experience, commenting, “I felt very powerful, I felt really connected, I felt really connected to my community, I felt really connected to fellow human beings in struggle, people who are being oppressed in Buffalo and beyond.”
She also described her view of “the incompetence of the Buffalo Police Department. They were embarrassed, in my opinion; the police liaisons had them shook. There’s a photo of all the cops standing there like ‘What do we do?’, and that continued until we left, that continued in their booking and processing of us. They were just wildly incompetent.” Karra also explained that “three separate officers repeated how peaceful we were. They said something like ‘That was a weird call to get, but they’re actually peaceful, it was just the traffic.’” According to Karra, “[t]hey were justifying their actions based on the traffic.”
These recent actions come in the wake of increasing ICE activity across upstate New York. Arrests by ICE were set to “grow by nearly 69 percent over last year,” with 75 percent of those arrested from Jan. 1 to Aug. 1 having “no criminal record,” according to Investigative Post. Buffalo has seen the most arrests of any municipality across upstate New York since Donald Trump returned to the presidency in 2025; the recent “surge in arrests—particularly those this summer—can be largely attributed to two factors: ICE has more than doubled its workforce, and the agency is retaliating against New York for a new law restricting cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration agencies,” as stated by Investigative Post.
As Karra explained regarding the necessity of people in support roles at actions like the Sept. 26 protest, “it takes a whole structure, and everybody can do something, and I think it is the moral imperative that they do, and I’m really excited to return Buffalo to a culture of non-violent direct action.”