In most of America’s major cities and tiny towns today, thousands of marchers gathered , moved by accounts of children separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, in the latest act of mass resistance against President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.
“I’m hoping that decent human beings come together, and enough is enough, we’re taking out country back over, that evil is not going to prevail,” said Patricia Carlan, a grandmother of nine from Danville, Indiana, among hundreds who gathered at her state’s capital.
At every one of the more than 700 planned marches, hundreds of thousands of people across the country, from liberal cosmopolitan areas like New York and Los Angeles to conservative Appalachia and Indiana epicenters like the front lawn of a Border Patrol station in McAllen, Texas, near a detention center where migrant children were being held in cages made thier views known.
There, people held American and Texas flags and signs depicting a migrant father, mother and child as the Holy Family with haloed heads traveling through the desert.
In New York City, Trump’s hometown, thousands of marchers poured across the Brooklyn Bridge in sweltering 90-degree heat, chanting “shame!” and “Donald Trump must go!” Drivers honked their horns in support.
“It’s important for this administration to know that these policies that rip apart families,”said the Rev. Julie Hoplamazian.
the Episcopal priest marching in Brooklyn said policies ”that treat people as less than human, like they’re vermin — are not the way of God, they are not the law of love”.
“Jesus was a refuge,” she said.
Protesters hold up signs on Civic Plaza in downtown Albuquerque, N.M. during the anti-ICE demonstration
In Washington, a massive crowd gathered in Lafayette Park across from the White House in what was expected to be the largest of the day’s protests.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of the musical “Hamilton,” sang a lullaby dedicated to parents who are unable to sing to their children. Singer-songwriter Alicia Keys brought her 7-year-old son, and read a letter written by a woman whose child had been taken away from her at the border.
“It’s upsetting. Families being separated, children in cages,” said Emilia Ramos, a cleaner in the district, fighting tears at the rally. “Seeing everyone together for this cause, it’s emotional.”
Thousands of protesters march in Houston, Texas, on Saturdy
Around her, thousands waved signs: “I care, do you?” some read, referencing a jacket the first lady wore when visiting child migrants amid the global furor over the administration’s zero-tolerance policy that forced the separation of more than 2,000 children from their parents. Her jacket had “I really don’t care, do U?” scrawled across the back, and that message has become a rallying cry for Saturday’s protesters.
“We care!” marchers shouted outside city hall in Dallas. Organizer Michelle Wentz says opposition to the administration’s “barbaric and inhumane” policy has seemed to cross political party lines. Marchers’ signs read “Compassion not cruelty” and “November is coming.”
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