A truck drove through a crowd of Jewish protesters outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Rhode Island Wednesday evening.
Officers used pepper spray on the crowd, and several were treated for eye irritation. No one was seriously injured.
“The truck came in, and people ran,” protester Lex Rofeberg tells the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I don’t think someone got directly hit by the car.”
Hundreds of Jewish protesters gathered at the ICE facility to protest the detention of illegal immigrants. The group belongs to the “Never Again Action” movement, which compares imprisoning illegal immigrants to how Nazis treated the Jews during the Holocaust.
The Jerusalem Post reports that around 9:45 p.m., a black pickup truck drove into a group of about 30 people at 10 to 15 miles mph. The group was blocking the entryway into the facility.
The group’s Twitter account posted that it was an ICE guard who drove the truck into the protesters:
BREAKING: Tonight we experienced a tiny sample of the violence ICE uses on our immigrant neighbors every day. An ICE guard drove his truck into our peaceful #JewsAgainstICE protest, then other guards came out and pepper sprayed the crowd.
We’ll be back. https://t.co/jhYh0orOIQ pic.twitter.com/8Q5d9N1yGy
— ✡️ Never Again Action ✡️ (@NeverAgainActn) August 15, 2019
But an official told ABC News that the person driving the truck was not an employee of ICE.
Never Again has been protesting outside the facility since early July.
