Protesters Around the Country Demand an END to the Separation of Immigrant Children from Parents

June 4, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

People came together for protests and marches in dozens of cities around the country on Friday, June 1, to condemn and demand an immediate end to the Trump/Pence regime’s sadistic policy of tearing immigrant children and parents apart at the southern border. Protests were held in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle, Houston, Los Angeles, Atlanta and many other cities. The ACLU was a part of organizing many of them, along with immigrant rights groups, SEIU and other unions, and more. In New York, well over 500 protesters took part in the “Jericho Walk,” repeatedly marching around the Office of Homeland Security in silence.

Over 600 children, as young as 18 months old, were taken from their parents in just the past month, as a result of the Jeff Sessions’s Department of In-Justice’s new “zero-tolerance” policy—which means charging every undocumented immigrant as a criminal and imprisoning them. To provoke their greatest fears, the government is not telling the parents where their children are being taken, nor when they will be rejoined. This is being done to refugees as well, most of them from Central America, who are seeking asylum after escaping the violence and poverty in their own countries. The Trump/Pence fascist regime is doing this in defiance of both U.S. immigration law and international agreements the U.S. has signed governing the treatment of refugees.

Democratic Party politicians spoke at many of these events, expressing concern while trying to channel people’s outrage into the dead end of elections. But reports of the rallies also described people who spoke from the heart about the inhumanity of what the government is doing. In front of the Houston City Hall a speaker said:

It's like babies being ripped out of their mothers' arms — literally ripped out of their mothers' arms. It's horrifying... And we can't rest until it stops happening.

Refuse Fascism took part in many of these actions. They reported that they “weren’t just protesting but sounding the alarm to the public, that this regime is a fascist regime and they are poised to do worse if they are not driven from power, letting people know our plan to drive them out and giving them concrete ways to be involved in such an effort.” In Seattle, where 200 gathered, a well-known Native American activist opened the rally speaking about the importance of stopping Trump’s attacks on immigrants and the painful U.S. history of genocide and the separation of families through the Native American boarding schools. She made a point of holding the Refuse Fascism sign from the stage during the entire rally that read “Call to Action: This Nightmare Must End, The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go”.

While it was very important that these hundreds stood up in many cities, it is a shocking sign of the normalization of fascism that these Nazi-like attacks on children did not bring tens of thousands into the streets in angry and determined outrage. This is a situation that urgently demands to be transformed.

Hundreds in Seattle joined the nationwide day of protests against the new Trump administration policy of separating undocumented immigrant children from their parents. (Photo: Elliot Stoller)

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