On a cold and windy Martin Luther King Jr. Day, hundreds of people marched through Center City to protest the actions of U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Organizers and marchers alike decried an ICE officer killing Renee Good in Minnesota, as well as the deaths of people in ICE custody since 2025.

Pennsylvania state Sen. Art Haywood said the march is a vigil to call out ICE officers, and that protesters are gathering in King’s tradition of “nonviolence and confrontation.”

“King reminds us our lives begin to end the moment we are silent about things that matter,” Haywood said.

Marchers gathered in front of Philadelphia’s Immigration Court on Market Street for songs and speeches, then walked to the ICE Field Office at 8th and Cherry streets.

Philadelphia pastor Daniel Eisenberg came to the march with his family, and said it’s scary to see what ICE officers are doing.

“Folks don’t feel safe. It’s not what I believe in. I think that we need to have everybody be safe, everybody’s welcome here, and right now I think that ICE is terrorizing communities that shouldn’t be,” he said. “These are people that are just trying to do the same thing that people have been doing here for generations — to build a family, to build community roots, to find purpose and to seek it.”

He came with a sign that said “Love thy neighbor.” His wife Emily, a public school teacher, came with a sign that said, “We’ve been trained for years on what to do if masked men with guns come to school,” in reference to ICE making arrests near schools, leading to drops in attendance and parents being afraid to take their children to school.

She said she would like a return to everyone having due process instead of “masked guys rolling up and plucking you out of the street.”

A recent poll from the Economist and YouGov found that the vast majority of people had heard about an ICE agent killing Good, and 50% think it was unjustified, as opposed to 30% who found it justified. The online polling firm Civiqs found that support for abolishing ICE has risen to 43%, the highest it has been since the firm started asking the question in 2019.

Raymond Torres, a 74-year-old Philadelphia resident who was born in Mexico City, came with a sign that said “Voting will melt ICE.”

“If we vote, we can cut the funds to ICE and save our neighbors,” he said.

Torres said he attended his first protest when he heard King speak in Philadelphia in 1967.

Philadelphia Rev. Gregory Holston helped lead the march. He said it’s significant the protest happened on a day to commemorate King, citing the connection between the civil rights movement and the end of the United States’ national quota system for immigration.

“If King were alive today, he’d be right out here with us, standing up against ICE, standing up against the raids, standing for righteousness, for justice and for equality for all,” Holston said.

Organizers ended the march by reading out the names of the people who had died in ICE custody since 2025, including the names of Chaofeng Ge and Parady La, who died in Pennsylvania.

Methodist pastor Alisa Lasater Wailoo from Germantown said how ICE is acting is “antithetical to who we are as a people.”

“The names we read are those that not only don’t get to go home here in Philadelphia, but never get to go home. There’s no excuse for that. We claim to be a people of freedom. We claim to be a multicultural democracy that values others. Well, then we need to find a way to do that peacefully, and embracing all the incredible people that are sent to us across the globe.”

Advocates say protests will continue in front of the ICE office every Monday and Wednesday. ICE did not respond to a request for comment.