Maya Stood in a Silent Protest With 11 Million Undocumented Immigrants
Drop the Charges! Drop the Ban!

April 2, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

On March 1, 2018, University of Chicago police brutally attacked and arrested Maya, a member of the Revolution Club, Chicago, as she was leaving campus after participating in a SILENT protest in the Reynolds Club student center, where almost the entire dining hall fell silent for 11 minutes in support of 11 million undocumented immigrants. On top of this outrageous attack, in which SHE is the one who sustained injuries, Maya has been indicted with a felony charge of battery on a police officer and resisting arrest. She was further targeted by the state at what should have been a routine bail hearing when the assistant state’s attorney presented a lengthy, distorted, and utterly irrelevant political dossier on Maya, implying that she should not be released—on the basis of her alleged political views and associations. She has been banned from campus as a condition of being released.

Meanwhile, the university has rolled out a red carpet for Steve Bannon to speak. Bannon spoke recently to a gathering of fascists in France and advised them, “Let them call you racist... wear it as a badge of honor.” His propagating of the racist myth of the “superiority of Western civilization” comes with the head of state, Donald Trump, giving speeches calling immigrants criminals, animals, and snakes, targeting sanctuary cities and states, ruthlessly hunting down and deporting people, holding the terror of deportation over the heads of hundreds of thousands of Dreamers, and separating children and parents in detention centers. At the same time the Trump/Pence regime assembles a war cabinet and makes bellicose threats to attack Iran and North Korea.

Universities are places where critical thinking can and should be what is in the air, where ideas are debated with intellectual rigor and creativity, where new ideas can take hold and reverberate throughout society. Instead, at the current moment, there is a real attempt to make them platforms to legitimize and normalize fascist ideas, and more and more the voices of dissent are being repressed with the power of the state.

Maya, a revolutionary who is fighting for the emancipation of all humanity, has courageously stood up to say the attacks on immigrants are intolerable, and she has been working to bring forward a mass, determined movement to drive the Trump/Pence regime from power. She has argued for the importance of taking up what is said in the filmed speech by Bob Avakian, “THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO! In The Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America, A Better World IS Possible,” in particular the need for everyone who cares about justice to step outside their comfort zones and be willing to put themselves on the line to prevent Trump/Pence fascism from consolidating its rule and fully implementing its program.

Drop the charges and drop the ban. Thursday, April 5, we will do as Maya did and stand for 11 minutes of silence, outside university president Robert Zimmer’s office at Levi Hall.

To contact Revolution Club, Chicago, find us on Facebook or Twitter @RevClubChi, 312.804.9121, revclub.chi@gmail.com, 1857 E. 71st Street in South Shore.

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