Divided families rallying cry
U.S. streets flood with sign-toting protesters
WASHINGTON — In major cities and tiny towns, hundreds of thousands of marchers gathered Saturday across America, moved by accounts of children separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, in the latest act of mass resistance against President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.
Protesters flooded more than 700 marches, from immigrant-friendly cities like New York and Los Angeles to conservative Appalachia and Wyoming. They gathered on the front lawn of a Border Patrol station in McAllen, Texas, near a detention center where migrant children were being held in cages, and on a street corner near Trump’s golf resort at Bedminster, N.J., where the president is spending the weekend.
“Do you know where our children are?” one protester’s sign there asked. Another offered: “Even the Trump family belongs together.”
Trump has backed away from the family separation policy amid bipartisan and
international uproar, and those marching Saturday demanded that the government quickly reunite the families that were already divided.
In the president’s hometown of New York City, an estimated 30,000 marchers poured across the Brooklyn Bridge, some carrying their children on their shoulders, chanting, “Shame!” Drivers honked their horns in support.
“It’s important for this administration to know that these policies that rip apart families — that treat people as less than human, like they’re vermin — are not the way of God, they are not the law of love,” said the Rev. Julie Hoplamazian, an Episcopal priest marching in Brooklyn.
The families split up as they tried to enter the U.S. were largely fleeing extreme violence, persecution or economic collapse in their home countries, often in Central America.
In Washington, D.C., a crowd gathered in Lafayette Park across from the White House in what was expected to be the largest protest of the day, stretching for hours under a searing sun.
The rally began with drums and a reminder that the story of most Americans began somewhere else.
A representative of the Piscataway Indian Nation addressed the crowd in Spanish, then English. Sebastian Medina-Tayac burned tobacco, an Indian prayer tradition, said a prayer and then sang an indigenous-language song from Bolivia that means, “take courage.”
“We don’t believe in borders. We don’t believe in walls,” Medina-Tayac said.
With temperatures hovering in the 90s in downtown Washington, organizers made repeated calls to the crowd to drink water and use sunscreen. About two hours into the rally, several demonstrators received medical attention after apparently falling ill from the heat. A few hundred yards from the stage, a firetruck began spraying its hose into the air, cooling off the crowd. Children attending the march with their parents streamed into the spray.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the musical Hamilton, sang a lullaby dedicated to parents unable to sing to their children. Singer-songwriter Alicia Keys read a letter written by a woman whose child had been taken away from her at the border.
“It’s upsetting. Families being separated, children in cages,” said Emilia Ramos, a cleaner in the district, fighting tears at the rally. “Seeing everyone together for this cause, it’s emotional.”
Around her, thousands waved signs: “I care,” some read, referring to a jacket that first lady Melania Trump wore when traveling to visit child migrants. Her jacket said, “I really don’t care, do U?” and it became a rallying cry for protesters Saturday.
“I care!! Do you?” read Joan Culwell’s T-shirt as she joined a boisterous rally in Denver.
“We care!” marchers shouted outside Dallas City Hall. Organizer Michelle Wentz said opposition to the Trump administration’s “barbaric and inhumane” policy has seemed to cross political party lines. The “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting people caught entering the country illegally led officials to separate more than 2,000 children from their parents before it was abandoned.
Sens. John Lewis, D-Ga., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Kamala Harris, D-Calif., attended rallies in their home states. In New York City, marchers heckled the headquarters for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, as they passed. Demonstrators in Kentucky gathered outside the Bowling Green office of Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and crowds in Chicago chanted “si, se puede” — yes, we can.
Some protesters held signs calling for the dissolution of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a recent rallying cry of lawmakers and immigration-rights groups. But that was not the purpose of Saturday’s march, organizers said.
“We have three main demands,” said Anna Galland, executive director of MoveOn.org, which co-sponsored the event. “Reunite families now, end family internment camps, and end the zero-humanity policy that created this humanitarian crisis and chaos in the first place.”
TRUMP’S TWEETS
Trump took to Twitter to show his support for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Tweeting from New Jersey on Saturday, Trump urged the agency’s agents to “not worry or lose your spirit.” He wrote that “the radical left Dems want you out. Next it will be all police.”
The GOP-led House soundly rejected a wide-ranging immigration bill last week despite Trump’s endorsement, a vote that followed the defeat on a harder-right package that garnered more conservative support.
On Saturday, Trump tweeted that he didn’t press GOP lawmakers to support the bills because they wouldn’t have cleared the Senate. He wrote that he released many House Republicans “prior to the vote knowing we need more Republicans to win in Nov.”
But the president’s statement contradicted his commentary three days ago in which he tweeted that House Republicans should approve the “STRONG BUT FAIR” bill even though Democrats wouldn’t allow it to pass in the Senate. A week earlier, he urged Republicans to stop wasting their time on the bill until after the elections.
GOP leaders are considering an alternative that would focus narrowly on preventing the government from separating children from migrant families caught entering the country without authorization. But any changes are not expected to happen before the July Fourth holiday as lawmakers attempt to agree on the bill’s language.
The president tweeted Saturday that when people enter the nation illegally, “we must IMMEDIATELY escort them back out without going through years of legal maneuvering. Our laws are the dumbest anywhere in the world.”
OUT IN FORCE
Though many at Saturday’s rallies were seasoned anti-Trump demonstrators, others were new to activism, including parents who said they felt compelled to act after heart-wrenching accounts of families torn apart.
Nationwide, groups came together in city parks and downtown squares, while others converged on the international bridge between El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico. At the border, they protested what speakers described as unconstitutional overreach by the Trump administration and heavy-handed tactics by immigration agents. They carried signs with slogans like “We are all immigrants” as they chanted “Love, not hate, makes America great.”
Marchers took to the streets in Raleigh, N.C.; Louisville, Ky.; Pittsburgh; Houston; as well as cities in Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico.
Steve Adelmund, a father of two, was inspired to organize a protest in rural Marshalltown, Iowa, after turning on the news on Father’s Day and seeing children being separated from their families and held in cages.
“It hit me in the heart. I cried,” said Adelmund, whose event drew about 125 people.
“If we can’t come together under the idea of ‘Kids shouldn’t be taken from their parents,’ where are we?” he asked. “We have to speak out now while we can, before we can’t.”
Five people were arrested outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Dallas for blocking a road. In Columbus, Ohio, at least one person was arrested when protesters blocked a downtown street, the Columbus Dispatch reported.
Light-rail service temporarily shut down in Minneapolis as thousands of demonstrators got in the way of the tracks. A rally in Portland, Maine, grew so large that police had to shut down part of a major street.
In Huntsville, Ala., police said one man was arrested after he got into a scuffle with protesters and pulled out a handgun; no one was injured.
In Portland, Ore., police ordered participants in a march by Patriot Prayer to disperse after officers saw assaults and projectiles being thrown. Some arrests were made.
The problems occurred as two opposing protest groups — Patriot Prayer and antifa — took to the streets. People in the crowd were lighting firecrackers and smoke bombs, and police used flash bangs to disperse the clashing protesters.
In downtown Los Angeles, John Legend serenaded the crowd while Democratic politicians who have clashed with Trump had strong words for the president, including U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, who called for impeachment.
Margarita Perez held up a Mexican flag as speakers addressed the crowd in Albuquerque, N.M.
“Those children that they are incarcerating and separating, they are our future generations. We need to provide for these children,” she said. “They will be our future leaders.”
Two thousand miles away in Boston, a Brazilian mother separated from her 10-year-old son at the border 37 days ago approached the microphone.
“We came to the United States seeking help, and we
never imagined that this could happen. So I beg everyone, please release these children, give my son back to me,” she said through an interpreter and wept.
Her son has pleaded with her on the phone to take him home.
“I beg you all,” she said. “Please fight and continue fighting, because we will win.”
In Washington, protesters ended their march at the white-columned Department of Justice. They taped their protest signs, written in English and Spanish, to its grand wooden doors.
“Fight for families,” the sign declared.
One protester from Alabama said he had traveled 11 hours to be in Washington on Saturday, because he feels the country is on the wrong path. In his hands he held the Bible and an American flag, hung upside down on its post.
“We’re in distress,” said Garrick Rawls, 32. “This is what distress looks like.” Information for this article was contributed by Ellen Knickmeyer, Susan Montoya Bryan, Emily Schmall, Martha Irvine, Sarah Betancourt,Amy Taxin, Rick Callahan, David Warren, Ryan Tarinelli, Bob Lentz, Ron Todt, Claire Galofaro, Julie Walker, Michael Sisak, Gillian Flaccus, Paul Elias, Ken Thomas, David Sharp and Damian Dovarganes of The Associated Press; by Alexandra Yoon-Hendricks and Zoe Greenberg of The New York Times; and by Marissa J. Lang, Julie Zauzmer, Hannah Natanson, Reis Thebault, Miela Fetaw, Perry Stein and Amy Zahn of The Washington Post.