BOSTON — A Connecticut woman drove to Boston on Saturday morning with a chainsaw, a vision, and a 24-foot block of ice. She carved the words "END ICE" on the Boston Common for the No Kings rally. She poured her heart into it. She launched an online fundraiser to pay for it. She said she felt compelled to do it whether she could afford to or not.
By Sunday night, someone had knocked the whole thing over.
Kat Dressler, an army veteran and chainsaw ice sculptor from Connecticut, told Boston.com that a bystander first emailed her to say a high school-aged kid had knocked over the letters spelling "ICE." A few hours later, someone came back and finished the job.
"Art has a lot of impacts on people, and it's a very emotional message and cause," Dressler said. "People feel divided on the ICE issue, and it creates a lot of emotion."
It certainly does.
A divided city — though maybe not in the way she thinks
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Dressler may have misjudged her audience. While leftist organizers were rallying on Boston Common to end ICE, many Bostonians have had enough — but not of ICE.
ICE's Boston field office has had one of its busiest stretches in recent memory. Just this month, agents arrested an MS-13 killer, two Tren de Aragua gangsters, and a man charged with raping seven children. Earlier this year, ICE arrested an anti-ICE activist who had been posting agents’ locations online. A Haitian national pleaded guilty to stealing $6.7 million in food stamps from a Boston convenience store scheme.
These are the arrests that "END ICE" wants to end.
Boston police were dispatched to the sculpture site after the vandalism but no police report was filed. Stephanie Schoen, a Brookline organizer with Speak Out Seniors, said she tried to file one herself but was told she needed to be physically present at the scene.
Schoen noted that a nearby sign promoting the progressive group Activist Evenings was also destroyed.
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"The 'ICE' part was knocked down first, so who knows, maybe it's someone who is against ICE," Schoen said, "but then when the other part was taken down and the sign was trampled on, we felt otherwise."
'Whether I was allowed to do it or not'
Dressler told Boston.com that the killing of Alex Pretti by a Border Patrol agent in Minneapolis inspired her to create the sculpture while she was studying ice carving in Alaska. She launched a fundraiser to cover the costs and drove to Boston to carve it Saturday morning.
"I felt like I was compelled to make this ice sculpture happen, whether I could afford to do it or not, whether I was allowed to do it or not," Dressler said. "It felt like something I absolutely had to do."
She designed the sculpture so that if it was vandalized, the message would still work — because, as she put it, the vandals would "literally be ending ICE."
In the end, they literally ended the whole sculpture.
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