A Mission District Dance Party Wants to ‘Melt the ICE’

This Sunday, like so many other nights at the Mission District queer bar El Rio, the dance floor will fill up with partygoers getting down to a live set of Latin fusion beats. There will be a full lineup of all trans DJs. There will be homemade tamales.

But the goal of this dance party won’t only be for everyone to have a good time. Organized by the queer mutual aid collective Abundance Alchemy, the Jan. 18 event will double as a fundraiser to support Bay Area families impacted by the recent spate of ICE deportation crackdowns — and as a form of grassroots resistance, its organizers say.

The name  of the party? The Melt the ICE Fest.

Collective member Yara, an Oakland-based visual artist, explains that Abundance Alchemy formed in late in 2023 in response to the widespread death and destruction happening in Gaza, as well as the police crackdowns on protests right here in the Bay Area. The idea, Yara says, was to figure out how folks could mobilize to help ease some of the suffering they were witnessing.

The collective’s first action was an art raffle in early 2024 that wound up raising $2,000 for organizations doing on-the-ground work to support victims in Palestine, Congo and Sudan. “That made us realize, ‘Oh, we can do something!'” Yara says.

Since then, the collective has mostly focused on distributing food, clothing and other supplies to unhoused communities in Oakland and San Francisco. It now has 25 to 30 active members, most of them queer, spread all over the Bay Area.

Sunday’s “Melt the ICE” event comes at a time when ICE’s aggressive, often violent deportation campaigns have sparked outrage nationwide, especially in the wake of an federal immigration agent’s fatal shooting of Minneapolis mother Renee Good last week. “It’s heartbreaking what’s happening ,” Yara says. “The way they’re just killing people in the street is disgusting.”

That said, Yara notes that the fundraising event has been in the works ever since ICE agents started ramping up the aggressiveness of their on-the-ground tactics this past fall. Members of Abundance Alchemy wanted to raise money to support local immigrant communities, but they also wanted do something fun and celebratory.

“In this world we live in where everything can feel so bleak, sometimes we need to make things that will make us happy and make us come together in joy — to not only cry together but dance together, and share in this trauma together,” Yara says.