Thank you for Camille Bugayong’s report about Tuesday night’s “ICE Tea Party” protest, in which a diverse crowd of Bostonians threw symbolic blocks of ice into Boston Harbor to challenge the Trump administration’s war on America’s immigrants (“Boston rebels against Trump policies with ‘ICE Tea Party,’ ” Metro, Dec. 18).

An online Globe story leading up to the protest referred to the organizers from Boston Indivisible and Mass 50501 as “progressive,” and “left-leaning.” Such labels underestimate, however, the groundswell of moderates, independents, people of faith, and newcomers to politics who also are showing up to oppose Trump’s policies. Millions of protesters gathered for Indivisible’s “Hands Off” and “No Kings” marches earlier this year, in thousands of communities, in every state. These Americans cannot be understood as “progressive” vs. “conservative” or “left” vs. “right.”

The tariff and immigration policies that were being challenged in Boston Tuesday, on the 252d anniversary of the original Boston Tea Party, are not “conservative” by any recognizable definition. If anything, one could argue that the protesters last week were fighting to conserve the norms of our democratic government, as Donald Trump destroys them.

They deserve our respect as modern American patriots.

Ellen Hume

North End
(Letter to the Editor, Boston Globe)