KINGSTON IMMIGRATION RALLY
Hundreds attend event to protest Trump policy of separating families at U.S.-Mexico border
KINGSTON, N.Y. » Amanda MacDonald sat beneath the shade of a tree, her young children next to her, as the Rev. Frank Alagna decried the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their parents at the border during a rally at City Hall.
“I felt like I had to come,” she said. “I can’t do much, but I felt like I couldn’t sit home while kids are still separated from their parents,” the Kingston mother of two said.
MacDonald was one of hundreds of people who endured the blistering heat Saturday to attend the rally and march protesting the president’s “zerotolerance” policy that has led to
“I felt like I had to come. I can’t do much, but I felt like I couldn’t sit home while kids are still separated from their parents.” — Amanda MacDonald
children being separated from their parents at the U.S./Mexico border.
Kingston’s protest was one of roughly 750 planned to take place across the country Saturday Locally, the protest drew people of all ages and from all walks of life, including more than a dozen members of the area’s faith community and several elected officials.
Many of those at the rally waved American flags and carried signs that read “Resist Hate,” “America’s Shame,” and “Families Belong
Together.”
At least one woman wore a shirt that read “I really care, do you” mocking the jacket that read “I Really Don’t Care, Do You,” worn by First Lady Melania Trump while boarding a plane to Texas to tour one of the facilities where children are being held.
Among those speaking at the rally was a boy who only wanted to be identified as Alex, who said the looks in the eyes of the children who have been separated from their parents “brings pain to me.”
They’re being put in cages like their wild animals even though they’re people too,” he said. “It’s very sad to see that.”
“Families should be together and they shouldn’t be in cages,” he added.
Alagna, of Holy Cross/ Santa Cruz Episcopal Church in Kingston, blasted Trump’s policy as “evil” and declared that opponents of the policy
“will not be complicit, like the Congressional whores who serve this administration. We will not silently acquiesce to the new order or endorse it as good for the new America.”
“This rogue administration has descended to a place of absolute moral degeneracy, tearing families apart, ripping children from their parent’s arms and even infants from their mother’s breasts without any care to ensure the possibility of every child being reunited with its parents,” he said.
Rabbi Yael Romer, of Congregation Emanuel of the Hudson Valley, in Kingston, called the policy “unconscionable, outrageous and unacceptable”
and reminded those at the rally that there was also a time in America’s not-to-distant past when America turned away from their borders Jews who were fleeing persecution under the Nazis.
“Enough is enough,” she said. “The world was silent too many times.”
“Words are not enough. We must act now. We must live by our convictions and we must pray with our feet,” she said.
Following the rally, protestors marched to George Washington Elementary School where Democratic Congressional hopeful Antonio Delgado, a Rhinebeck resident, also spoke.