By Michael Armstrong

Homer Independent Press

As part of national “ICE Out for Good” events held last Saturday, about 150 people waved signs and lit candles at  a combined protest and vigil at the corner of Lake Street and the Homer Bypass.

The protest, a grassroots effort organized locally, was in memory of Renee Good, the Minneapolis woman shot and killed during a traffic encounter by a Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent on Jan. 7.

Standing in 18-degree cold, people held signs that read “Stop ICE terror; defund Trump’s Gestapo,” “Abolish ICE” and “Believe your eyes not the lies.”

Saturday’s protest is the latest in at least a dozen protests held since the start of President Donald Trump’s administration in January 2025. Protests have been held at WKFL Park on Pioneer Avenue and at the Lake Street and Bypass intersection. This month has seen back-to-back Saturday protests, with the Jan. 10 action following a smaller event held last Saturday at WKFL Park. As with a Nov. 22 protest held on the Bypass, several people showed up in inflatable animal costumes.

One group of protesters on the north bound side of the Bypass held blue-and-white professionally printed signs that read “Freedom of the press,” “Separation of church and state,” “Due process,” “Equal rights for all,” “Defend the rule of law” and “This is democracy.”

Those signs are part of the Homer Sign Project, a group that designs and has printed the signs for pop-up protests, said Deb Oudiz, one of the sign holders.

“These designs are all about the tenets of our democracy and educating people who, apparently have, a lot of them have either not known or forgotten what our democracy is about,” Oudiz said. “And we want to bring that to everyone’s attention, because at this point, we are in critical need of greater education on what democracy is.”

During the one-hour protest from noon to 1 p.m., many people driving by honked their horns in apparent support. But not everyone was happy with the protest. 

Right after Oudiz talked to a reporter from the Homer Independent Press, a person driving a black diesel pickup truck with two snow machines on back slowed and “rolled coal” on Oudiz and others holding signs, producing a thick cloud of noxious black smoke.

Some truck owners modify their engines and exhaust systems so it produces the black smoke. Rolling coal as an act of counter-protest in Homer dates back to the January 2017 Women’s March and has been seen at other recent Homer protests.

“The vehicles capable of doing this typically have a modified exhaust system requiring the driver to push a button or pull a lever to blow the smoke, so it is a very intentional act,” Homer Police Chief Mark Robl wrote in an email about rolling coal. 

In a follow-up phone interview, Homer Police Officer Michael Scanlon noted Alaska’s Administrative Code regulates exhaust emissions systems such that “emissions from a … diesel-powered motor vehicle do not result in a reduction of visibility of greater than 40 percent through the exhaust effluent for more than any five consecutive seconds,” according to the code. Rolling coal does not meet the definition of harassment or assault under Alaska’s criminal code.

Scanlon describes himself as something of a motorhead. He said diesel engines can be legally modified using a device called a tuner. Those can be plugged into the electronic control monitor of the engine so that if needed the engine gets more fuel and extra power. That can be useful in towing trailers, for example. When a driver rolls coal, they’re giving the engine more fuel without burning it up as more power.

“Effectively what they’re doing is bumping up their injector pump and putting it on that top setting,” Scanlon said. “That’s what makes the smoke. They can’t burn it all.”

Rolling coal too much also can damage diesel engines by overheating them, he said. 

According to the Connecticut Office of Legislative Research, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey and Utah have laws penalizing rolling coal.

Scanlon said the avenue for addressing rolling coal is through the Environmental Protection Agency.

“The bottom line is that it’s going to be something the EPA would look at,” he said. 

Deb Purington spoke on why she protested last Saturday.

“It’s about all I can do, and just gotta show up and hope it makes a difference,” she said.

One woman, Yonah Luecken, had the quintessential Alaska protest sign: words written on silver duct tape stuck to the back of her jacket that read “Stand with Minnesota.”

On why she protested, Luecken said, “I’m here because we are living in the upside down when we have a president who seems to be declaring a war on a state, that he has been making decisions that are no good for this country, that are against the ideals that we stand for,” she said.

Luecken also objected to Trump’s reaction to the Good killing. Trump and other officials claimed the agent who shot Good, identified by the New York Times as Jonathan Ross, acted in self defense after agents contacted Good and she drove away from the scene. Times reporters wrote that a video analysis by the New York Times contradicts official accounts and that the agent crossed to the left of Good’s Honda Pilot as she turned her wheels to the right.

Luecken said Trump hasn’t been acting the way a president should.

“As an example of what a president is supposed to do, after what just happened in Minnesota, a president is supposed to stand up there and say, ‘This was just a tragedy, and we’re going to investigate it. We’re going to have the FBI working with local authorities, and we’re going to do what we can to prevent something like this from ever happening again,’ instead of saying the horrible, ugly things that he’s saying.”