Chicago: Hundreds March Through Downtown Against the Muslim Ban
February 2, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From readers:
On Wednesday, February 1, the Chicago Arab American Action Network (AAAN) and a coalition of other groups organized a press conference and march to protest Trump’s Muslim ban. This same grouping had organized people to go to O’Hare Airport for two days in a row when the ban was first announced. Billed as “Day 5 of the resistance to Trump’s executive orders,” the event began with a press conference outside the offices of the Department of Homeland Security. Lots of media showed up as an array of speakers spoke out against the ban. Besides Arabs, there were speakers representing Filipinos, Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar, Mexicans and Africans, and overall immigrant rights groups.
As the crowd took to the streets more people joined in, reaching possibly 1,000 at its height. The crowd was overwhelmingly people in their 20s or early 30s who feel strongly about the Trump regime’s demonizing and targeting of Muslims and immigrants, and who see this often connected to racism and white supremacy in the U.S. The majority appeared to be white but there were also sizable sections of Arabs and other minorities, many of whom were immigrants. Given the fear and terror directed toward immigrant and Muslim communities, this is important. Among the slogans people took up: “No papers, no fear, immigrants are welcome here”; “No Trump, No KKK, no racist USA”; “From Palestine to Mexico, All the Walls Have Got to Go!”
Refuse Fascism’s “No! We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America” signs in English and Arabic and English and Spanish were taken up by people in the crowd. We passed out hundreds of copies of the important new statement from Sunsara Taylor, “Fascism on the March, Sharpening Crisis, and the Urgency to Act.”
At the end of the protest the crowd chanted, “The People Demand, The Fall of the Trump Regime!”
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