San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Protests across the nation target policy on migrants
Rally is held in S.A.’s Main Plaza
WASHINGTON — Protesters marched into Lafayette Square opposite the White House on Saturday and chanted, “Families belong together!”
They were joined in opposing President Donald Trump’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy, by tens of thousands of other protesters in rallies from New York to California, including in San Antonio.
Animated by what they view as the cruel treatment of migrants seeking refuge in the U.S. from violence in their home countries, the crowds turned out bearing homemade signs that read “Abolish ICE” — the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — and “Zero tolerance for family separation.”
In the Alamo City, organizers estimated nearly 2,000 people packed Main Plaza during the two-hour event.
It drew participants of all ages protesting what they called “shameful” actions of the United States in separating families.
While Washington was the political epicenter of the protests, similar scenes unfolded in cities around the country.
Rallies took place in large border cities like El Paso, state capitals including Salt Lake City and Atlanta, and smaller, interior towns such as Redding, California.
In total, organizers anticipated more than 700 protests, in all 50 states and even internationally.
While the occupant of the White House was away for the weekend at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, images of the rallies were broadcast by cable news networks throughout the day.
For two sisters in the nation’s capital, Claudia Thomas and Monica Escobar, the sight of immigrant children being taken from their parents hit close to home.
When they were young, they immigrated to the U.S. from Guatemala, one of several Central American countries that’s a source of migrants today. They said they were out to stand up for “human decency.”
“No human being should be going through what they’re going through,” Escobar said. “God bless those families.”
Across the nation, the protesters largely were peaceful as they descended on statehouses and Immigration and Customs Enforcement buildings and gathered in plazas and in parks, where they danced, chanted and sang.
Many clutched signs in one hand with messages berating Trump and his immigration policies. And, given the summer heat, many clutched water bottles in the other.
In Chicago, all police stations, fire departments and hospitals opened as cooling stations. In Washington, fire trucks misted attendees with water, to cheers.
Celebrities such as Kerry Washington, star of the ABC series “Scandal,” and comedian Amy Schumer joined the protests in New York, and politicians like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., joined the demonstration in Boston.
Trump signed an executive order June 20 meant to quell outrage over the separation of families by housing parents and children together, for an indefinite period, in ad hoc detention centers.
The order explicitly states that authorities will continue to criminally prosecute adults who cross the border illegally.
Many of the more than
2,300 children separated from their migrant parents remain at makeshift shelters and foster homes. Although a federal judge in San Diego issued an order Tuesday calling for the reunification of families separated at the border within 30 days, White House officials have said following that timetable would be difficult.
“We don’t want a situation where we’re replacing baby jails with family camps,” said Karthik Ganapathy, a spokesman for MoveOn, a progressive advocacy organization that helped organized the protest.
Over the past month, marches across the country have cropped up, adding to the pressure on the Trump administration to yield to calls to end the practice of splitting up or detaining families.
“The idea of kids in cages and asylum seekers in prisons and moms being separated from breast-feeding children, this is just beyond politics. It really is just about right and wrong,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash.
On Thursday, she was arrested with more than 500 other women who occupied a Senate office building as part of a Women’s March protest against Trump’s immigration policy.
Jayapal said she has visited a federal prison just south of Seattle and met with 174 women and several dozen men who had been transferred from the Texas border.
She said she was moved by the stories of asylum seekers and parents — stories of family members killed, of children left behind, of violent physical attacks and domestic abuse.
“I promised them that I would get their stories out and I promised them I would do everything I could to reunite their families,” Jayapal said.
In New York, protesters overflowed Foley Square in Lower Manhattan and filled the surrounding sidewalks.
At every intersection on the way to the central march location, clusters of people chanted, “When children are under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back!”
Crowds also inched across the Brooklyn Bridge, a little more than a mile long, for more than two hours.
On one side, in Brooklyn, protesters filed into Cadman Plaza, where people stood in the center or sat in the shade, displaying colorful signs and listening to speakers onstage.
A small group of mostly women and children rallied in Marquette, Michigan, in one of the few counties in the state that voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
Silke-Maria Weineck, a German studies and comparative literature professor at the University of Michigan, dressed her service dog, Meemo, with an “Abolish ICE” sign for the occasion.
“It’s certainly a conservative part of the country,” she added, “but people feel very strongly about their children.”
Outside the Bedminster country club where Trump was spending the weekend, a few protesters could be seen.
“My civility is locked in a cage,” said one sign. “Reunite families now.”