Driving down Plymouth Road at the intersection of Green on Saturday Feb. 21, people with signs protested ICE, and were given friendly honks of support by passersby.
Standing with his sign was Clague parent Ryan Flaherty.
According to Flaherty, this protest means a couple of things. He said the first thing is expressing the people’s outrage and frustration that a government law enforcement agency is killing American citizens. This agency is called ICE which stands for (immigrating and customs enforcement). As Bill Chappell writes in his article on NPR, ICE has seen an increase in funding of $75 billion between 2024- 2026, thanks to Donald Trump’s budget passed in 2025. Flaherty added the bigger message isn’t just about the “murders of two bystanders-its about the cruelty of what ICE is tasked to do.”
“They are given permission to break into people’s homes, workplaces, community centers, and worst of all their school to seek out and arrest people whom they believe (often without evidence or judging by skin color) are here unlawfully,” Flaherty said.
People are protesting the cruelty that is behind these policies.
“The hope is that if enough people are loud enough and persistent enough, we will get politicians to halt the funding for both ICE and DHS. We want a country where immigrants aren’t assumed to be criminals or automatically treated like criminals,” Flaherty said.
The first protest “four corners” protest, of which the Plymouth-Green protest is a part, was about 2-3 days after Alex Pretti had been killed by ICE..
The organizer of this protest is Ann Arbor School Board Member and retired Clague Middle School teacher Jeff Gaynor.
“I just met him at the rally about two weeks ago,” Flaherty said. “He told me his name and I recognized it from the event listing which is found on a site called Mobilize, which is a website dedicated listing a wide-range of political events and activities– protests, town hall meetings, letter writing and postcard writing sessions, and many other opportunities for like-minded people to get involved.”
This isn’t the first time Gaynor has spear-headed a protest with co-planner Corky Wattles.
“Corky Wattles and I have a history of organizing protests,” Gaynor said.
The first one they did independently was in 2020.
“To be honest, I and a lot of the people in my life are very fortunate,” Flaherty said. “We could probably choose to ignore some of the anti-democratic, discriminatory, cruel, and unjust actions of this Trump administration, and we might not see a lot of negative impact on our lives… in the short term. But two things– in the short term, millions of people in our country and outside of our country are having their basic human rights, freedoms, and dignity robbed from them. As Martin Luther King Jr. once said: ‘the time is always right to do what’s right.’”
Flaherty said that young people– high school and younger– are already doing their part.
“And know this stat– if about 3.5% of the population gets activated– participates in some protests, calls their congress people, joins groups/ organizations resisting policies they oppose– then change is almost unstoppable,” he said.
The protest was located on the four corners of the intersection on Green road and Plymouth Rd, and these protests will continue to be held every Saturday from 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. The other “three corners” of these four corners protests (held on the same days at the same time) are at the intersections of Jacksons and Maple; Stadium and Main; and Washtenaw and Huron Parkway.
