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Hundreds of protesters listen to speakers outside the William A. Bootle Federal Building & United States Courthouse during the March on Macon on Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2026, in Macon, Ga.
Credit: Katie Tucker / The Telegraph
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Anti-ICE protest rebukes ‘collapse’ of due process in downtown Macon
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A local attorney who specializes in wrongful death lawsuits was among hundreds of protesters on the steps of the federal courthouse in downtown Macon on Wednesday night, denouncing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Caleb Walker, an attorney with Macon’s McArthur Law Firm, carried a sign that read, “End the secret police.” The 44-year-old compared ICE to authoritarian agencies including the Gestapo of Nazi Germany, Stasi of East Germany and the KGB of the Soviet Union.
“We have untrained, militarized, masked federal thugs on the street agitating and intimidating for no other reason than to incite fear and intimidate people who are just peacefully minding their own business,” Walker said.
Walker echoed some demonstrators’ fears that “our country is going to slip into a 100% fascist government,” he told The Telegraph.
Since President Donald Trump took office, federal immigration officers have used deadly force on dozens of people, including citizens like Renee Good. Her family’s legal team is connected to the wrongful death civil rights case in the death of George Floyd, who died under the knee of a police officer in 2020.
Local protesters marched a half-mile and back through downtown, from Rosa Parks Square across from Macon-Bibb County City Hall, to the federal courthouse for the Middle District of Georgia on Mulberry and Third streets.
Even an on-duty law enforcement officer called ICE’s aggressive tactics wrong, and supported the protesters. Lt. Cedric Penson was one of several Bibb County Sheriff’s Office deputies assigned to post up around the march for safety.
“Not just law enforcement, it could be any profession … what’s right is right and what’s wrong is wrong,” Penson said. “I commend these people. It takes courage to stand up for what’s right.”
When free speech under the First Amendment is jeopardized, “then you’re in trouble,” he said.
Nobody was arrested at the protest, according to Bibb County Sheriff David Davis, who stood by in case anything were to escalate. BCSO patrol vehicles followed protesters and blocked traffic along the route.
John Roberts, an organizer of the march, agreed with Penson but said those rights, as well as due process under the Fifth Amendment, have already crumbled.
“We are living in a country where the forms of the system remain, but the meaning has collapsed,” Roberts bellowed into a megaphone. “We are governed by procedures without purpose.”
The chief federal judge in Minnesota, where the two most recent killings by ICE agents have occurred, ordered Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, to appear in court Friday and explain why detainees have been denied due process, PBS News reported.
Roberts helped lead the local anti-ICE demonstration, dubbed “March on Macon,” with Middle Georgia Democratic Socialists, Macon Rising and the Macon-Bibb County Democratic Committee.
While attendees started to trickle home around 7:30 p.m., Roberts stood with his 11-year-old daughter at Rosa Square Park as people lit candles and laid flowers in memory of Good and Alex Pretti, who were both fatally shot by ICE officers in recent weeks.
Elise Bouley, a professor in Mercer University’s World Languages and Cultures Department, said she became a U.S. citizen in 2025, after emigrating from France.
Now, she says she doubts that her citizenship will protect her from being targeted by the federal government. Over 170 U.S. citizens were arrested and physically abused by ICE by October 2025, ProPublica reported.
“I don’t want to … think that I’m safe, cause no one’s safe anymore, not even American citizens,” Bouley said as the crowd chanted around her.
This story comes to GPB through a reporting partnership with Macon Telegraph.
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