Migrant separation protests sweep US
DEMONSTRATORS DEMAND DIVIDED FAMILIES BE REUNITED
Hundreds of thousands of protesters across America, moved by accounts of children separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border, marched yesterday — in major cities and tiny towns — to demand President Donald Trump’s administration reunite the divided families.
More than 750 marches drew hundreds of thousands of people across the country, from immigrant-friendly cities like Los Angeles and New York to conservative Appalachia and Wyoming under the banner Families Belong Together.
Thousands dressed in white gathered in sweltering heat in Lafayette Park across from the White House in what was expected to be the largest of the day’s protests.
“What’s next? Concentration Camps?” one marcher’s sign read. “I care, do you?” read another, referencing a jacket the first lady wore when visiting child migrants amid the global furore over the administration’s zero-tolerance policy that forced the separation of more than 2,000 children from their parents.
Her jacket had “I really don’t care. Do you?” scrawled across the back, and that message has become a rallying cry for yesterday’s protesters.
“We care!” marchers shouted outside city hall in Dallas. Organiser Michelle Wentz says opposition to the administration’s “barbaric and inhumane” policy has seemed to cross political party lines.
The US ambassador to Estonia,
James Melville, will retire from the
State Department next month, a move he said was prompted by
Donald Trump’s jibes and treatment of European allies.
The announcement comes ahead of a summit in Brussels of Nato allies on July 11 and 12, which has been clouded by
Trump’s angry claims that Europe is exploiting the United States by underspending on defence.
The US embassy in Tallinn said the career diplomat would retire after finishing his three-year assignment in Estonia in late July.
But in a private Facebook post first reported by Foreign Policy,
Melville said frustration over Trump’s■ barbs had made him decide “it was time to go.” Trump recently told fellow western leaders that the Nato alliance was “as bad as Nafta” — a
North American trade deal that he has threatened to tear up.
“A Foreign Service Officer’s DNA is programmed to support policy and we’re schooled right from the start, that if there ever comes a point where one can no longer do so, particularly if one is in a position of leadership, the honourable course is to resign,” Melville’s post said, according to the magazine.
“Having served under six presidents and 11 secretaries of state, I never really thought it would reach that point for me,” said Melville, who has worked 33 years in the foreign service.
“For the President to say the EU was ‘set up to take advantage of the United States, to attack our piggy bank,’ or that ‘Nato is as bad as Nafta’ is not only factually wrong, but proves to me that it’s time to go,” he reportedly wrote in his post.
Also late on Friday, fellow career diplomat Susan Thornton — who Trump had tapped for assistant secretary for East Asian affairs — declared she would retire, according to CNN.
Melville’s announcement follows the resignation of several other senior envoys over differences with the Trump administration, including the US ambassador to Panama John Feeley and Elizabeth Shackelford, a prominent US diplomat who was based in Nairobi.
Trump’s administration was quick to dismiss the ambassadors who served under his predecessor, but has been slow to refill the diplomatic roster.