An Antifa group is claiming credit for releasing thousands of crickets into a newly constructed headquarters of an architecture firm that is building new immigration detention centers in Canada.
The group claims to have pulled a sheet of plywood off of a wall at the headquarters of the Montreal architecture company Lemay and funneled in the crickets.
“Lemay, along with Quebec-City based company Groupe A, has been awarded a contract to build a new immigration detention centre in Laval, a suburb of Montreal. It is slated to open in 2020. We oppose borders, prisons, and immigration detention centres. We struggle for a world where people are free to stay and free to move; a world without white supremacy, capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy,” the Antifa group wrote in a communique published on Montreal Counter-Info.
The group wrote that they “see the release of these crickets as merely the beginning of a concerted effort to stop the new immigration detention centre from being built. Crickets are known to reproduce quickly and are difficult to exterminate. Their constant noise and quick proliferation through any space they have access to makes them much more than a nuisance to have around. The crickets will multiply inside Lemay’s new headquarters in the gentrifying neighbourhood of St. Henri, even after the wall we deconstructed has been replaced. Meanwhile, we will get even more organized in our resistance to this new immigration detention centre and all that it represents.”
Laval is slated to build two new immigration detention facilities, one in Laval and one in Surrey, and upgrade an existing detention center in Toronto. The Canadian government is attempting to upgrade their immigration infrastructure as current detention centers are not up to international standards. The new facilities are going to have easy access to outdoor areas and meeting spaces and will be far nicer than the current conditions that people are being kept in when they cross the borders illegally.
“We hope that the resistance to this prison continues to proliferate, faster and further than thousands of crickets,” the anarchists concluded.
