S.F. rally: Hundreds gather to protest policy separating migrant families
SAN FRANCISCO >> Chanting “Stop taking the children,” immigrants, activists and tech workers on Tuesday protested the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policies that are separating children from their parents at the southwest border and causing outrage and debate on Capitol Hill and around the world.
“I can’t stand to hear one of those children cry and we’re hearing thousands of them,” said Judith Gips, 61, who teaches immigrant children in King City. “We’re going to take these children’s cries to get together and make ourselves heard. We have to take risks ourselves to help people who have risked everything to bring a little bit of decency to this country.”
The rally in front of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in downtown San Francisco drew several hundred protest-
ers, blocking off a stretch of Sansome Street. It came as the Trump administration doubled down this week on its “zero tolerance” policy for illegal border crossers, arresting parents and taking more than 2,300 children to shelters over a recent six-week stretch. The sounds of crying children at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility begging for their parents, picked up on a secretly-recorded audio tape, were posted this week by ProPublica, creating a larger and more impassioned backlash to the policy.
“We are the people who wash your dishes, wash the underwear and give the food to the children. We take care of you,” said one woman, who took the microphone set up outside the San Francisco ICE office and said she was an undocumented immigrant. “We are not criminals. Trump is the criminal. We are all human beings.”
In Washington, D.C., while Trump continues to falsely blame Democrats for his family separation policy, Republican senators, who have rarely taken on Trump, on Tuesday worked to defuse the growing crisis.
“All of the members of the Republican conference support a plan that keeps families together,” Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican senator from Kentucky, said Tuesday, endorsing a plan to keep parents and children together while their cases are going through the court system.
House Democrats, including Zoe Lofgren of San Jose and Jimmy Panetta from Monterey, introduced a “Keep Families Together Act” to end family separations at the border.
In Sacramento, Gov. Jerry Brown faced calls from activists and other elected officials on Tuesday
to cancel the state’s deployment of National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border over the family separation crisis. The state has about 400 service members on the border, helping support border security while not actively enforcing immigration law.
While at least nine other governors have curtailed their Guards’ involvement in the border mission, Brown has taken no move to follow suit.
“This is a shameful chapter in American history and California should have no part in — directly or indirectly — imposing irreparable trauma on thousands of vulnerable young children,” state Sen. Kevin de León, who is running for the U.S. Senate, wrote in a letter to Brown.
Although the trauma among immigrant families is happening mostly along the Texas, Arizona and California borders with Mexico, Bay Area activists have been doing their part to express their outrage and frustration. A Silicon Valley couple’s early effort to raise $1,500 on Facebook Fundraisers to post bond to “Reunite an immigrant parent with their child” quickly grew to more than $5.8 million in donations for a Texas nonprofit legal defense fund.
At the Tuesday rally, tech workers mixed with immigrants and activists, all horrified at the images of children being torn from their parents. Many of the children are being held in a former Walmart store in Texas.
“This is an excessive interpretation
of the law,” said Lauren Simpson, attending the rally with her 2-year-old daughter in a stroller. “And it seems as if it’s bordering on child abuse.”
“This a way for us to show the families that we are behind them,” said Jaime Walsh, 26, a web designer who recently moved to San Francisco. “It’s also a way for us to show the Trump administration that we are not going to put up with it.”
Trump’s policy does not seem to be diminishing his popularity among his supporters, including Jesse Bernal, a 38-year-old youth pastor in Morgan Hill who says the border crisis is being exaggerated by a liberal media.
“Obviously nobody wants to separate parents from
children, because it’s cruel. But it’s also cruel that parents are separating themselves when they send their children across and try to bypass the system and slip through,” he said of the thousands of unaccompanied minors who cross the border without their parents.
For the thousands of children recently separated from their parents through Trump’s crackdown, Bernal said the government should speed up its process and try to reunite families as soon as possible.
“The separation is not going to go on forever,” said Bernal, whose family has been in California since the de Anza expedition in the 1770s and whose wife crossed the Mexican border illegally with her parents as
a child. “I think, and this is my opinion, liberals are going to just try to hype up the emotions. That’s what’s happening, just driving up the emotions because you want this administration to not win 2020.” Help us tell the story of families caught up in the immigration system and children separated from their parents. Share your stories with staff writers Tatiana Sanchez (tsanchez@ bayareanewsgroup.com or 408-920-5836) and Julia Prodis Sulek (jsulek@ bayareanewsgroup.com or 408-278-3409).