The executive director of a group that advocates for immigrants is planning an eight-day, 130-mile walk from Pittsburgh’s U.S. Immigration and Customs enforcement office to the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Clearfield County, and he’s coming through Indiana on Tuesday.
Jaime Martinez, the head of “Frontline Dignity”, plans to walk 13 miles from Pittsburgh to Monroeville today. Then tomorrow, he will walk 22 miles from Monroeville to Apollo. On Tuesday, he will walk 24 miles in nine hours and attend a “community dinner” at the Lemoona House Restaurant on Philadelphia Street in Indiana.
Subsequent stops will be in Northern Cambria, Loretto, Tyrone, and Osceola Mills before arriving in Philipsburg, where the largest ICE detention center in the Northeast United States is located.
On its website, Frontline Dignity calls the walk, “Frontline on Foot: The Way to Moshannon”, writing:
This is what it means to walk with dignity.
And now, we’re making that commitment visible.
For 8 days, we are walking from the ICE office in Pittsburgh, PA to Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Philipsburg, PA—the largest ICE detention facility in the Northeast.
Retracing a road too many families are forced to take.
But we are walking it differently.
Together.
Publicly.
With purpose.
This is a pilgrimage.
A protest.
A refusal to let this happen unseen.
(SOURCE: frontlinedignity.org)
The public is invited to join the walk, and motorists are advised to carefully watch for walkers along area roadways.
ICE agents on Friday arrested 13 people identified as illegal immigrants at the PennDOT driver’s license center in Kittanning after local police notified them that citizens had warned of large numbers of “foreign people” who had turned up there. Some of the immigrants fled and were not captured. Some of those detained were described by Homeland Security as being from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan.
