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The Sackets Harbor protest and others: a brief note on civil unrest in Northern NY State [1]

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Date: 2025-04-08

We were so surprised and pleased to see the protest at Sackets Harbor NY given notice on Rachel Maddow Monday night. For those of you who missed it, on March 27 there was an ICE raid on a local farm, supposedly to arrest a South African man on child pornography charges. He was taken, as were other farm workers, and a woman and her three children. They were sent to Texas—which for a lot of Northern New Yorkers is what Hell must be like.

The woman and children were playing by the rules, they had declared themselves to immigration judges, attended court on their assigned dates, and were following the legal process to legally remain in the country. The children were going to school in the Sackets Harbor school district. This is probably much of the reason there was so much local backlash: this was a hard-working woman, doing what she was supposed to, and the kids were well known and part of the Sackets school family. Many people were horrified. A lot of us were outraged.

Northern NY state is a darkly red area, make no mistake about that: people here cheerfully elected Claudia Tenney and the truly vile Elise Stefanik. That red majority went for Dotard Clump—and so just killed the Canadian tourist/shopping business they depend on. That protest at Sackets was unprecedented in scale, over a thousand people attending.

As a grumpy old atheist and iconoclast there are few people I venerate, but Rachel Maddow is high on the list of those that tempt me toward adoration. But I have to quibble about one thing she got partly wrong on her broadcast: saying that most of the protesters were from the small town of Sackets Harbor. A seasonal town, its winter population is probably a tenth of that in the summer, and while a lot of townsfolk were out there making themselves heard, quite a few of the protesters were from the wider area—ten, twenty, thirty miles away. I know this even though I wasn’t there because my wife was there. So was my sister. Along with several others—like my wife and sister—who went there directly from a Hands Off protest about ten miles away in Watertown NY earlier in the afternoon.

Protests have gotten started up here, and they are growing rapidly. The first Watertown protest was small, but each one since has gotten much larger. The one the day of the Sackets demonstration was cited by the local news as being nearly as big as the one that made national TV. We’ve had empty chair meeting for both Tenney and Stefanik. We are pissed off.

We had a protest here on our own home turf of Wellesley Island on March 17, mounted in reaction to cuts to Veterans’ services and benefits. There were ten people, two of whom had to duck out part way through—I was one of them. Protests just don’t—or at least didn’t—happen here. Another Island protest will get put together before long, and as the weather improves, they, like other protests, will get larger because the person who had no reason to protest last week may have ample reason to carry a sign next week.

My wife turned 72 last fall, I caught up with her about a week ago. We have survived this far as an odd old couple living on the fringes by division of labor. We are heading into crazy season. I caretake over a dozen places, and will be working seven days a week into early December. Plus summer means the heavier parts of the garden work, lawn work, and other stuff. Her major sales outlet, an artists’ coop, was lost last year when the building was sold; she’s found a couple smaller shops and is still selling, but has cut way back on shows. What will take up most of her time is our wildlife rehab practice, and shortly we will get inundated with orphaned and injured wildlife—a task suddenly much more complicated because of Avian influenza. Feedings and cage cleanings will begin early in the morning and go late into the evening, the phone will ring constantly, and there will be animal transports and releases that may take up to three hours. It’s a grind, but worth it.

Put me in a room with four people and within five minutes I’m plotting my escape. She is much more sociable, so she goes to the meetings (50501, Indivisible, Stronger Together) the protests and the like. I make signs, find data, keep the woodstove going (and yes, it snowed today), an income coming in, keep our rescue dog Bailey from getting too wacky from being left alone, deal with the animal chores and phone and have a nice dinner on the table when she gets home. It will get crunchy, but we’ll manage. We’re two old-timers doing the best we can in difficult times, and this old-timer has run out of time to write any more—except to say that the woman and her kids are supposed to be coming back, and they will be warmly welcomed by their adopted neighbors.

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