Demonstrators march across America to protest Trump’s hard line immigration policies
HUNDREDS of protest marches were held across America to demand migrant families separated under Trump’s harsh immigration policy be reunited.
News
Don't miss out on the headlines from News. Followed categories will be added to My News.
THOUSANDS of demonstrators, baking in the heat and boiling mad at US immigration policy, marched across the country on Saturday (Sunday AM AEST) to protest the separation of families under President Donald Trump’s hardline agenda.
More than 600 planned marches were expected to draw hundreds of thousands of people across the country, from immigrant-friendly cities like Los Angeles and New York City to conservative Appalachia and Wyoming under the banner Families Belong Together.
Though many who showed up are seasoned anti-Trump demonstrators, others were new to immigration activism, including parents who say they feel compelled to show up after heart-wrenching accounts of children forcibly taken from their families as they crossed the border illegally.
In New York City, protesters chanted “shame!” and “shut detention down!”.
Crowds gathered in sweltering 33-degree heat at a Manhattan park before marching across the Brooklyn Bridge to Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn, near the federal courthouse.
A protest also converged near the golf course where President Trump is spending the weekend. Demonstrators gathered on a street corner near Mr Trump’s golf resort at Bedminster, New Jersey.
They waved signs with the messages, “Do you know where our children are?” and “Even the Trump family belongs together.” It’s not known if Trump saw the protest.
In Washington, many thousand protesters marched to the US Department of Justice.
In downtown Dallas, Texas, hundreds of demonstrators slowly streamed through the streets, reciting chants and carrying a sea of protest signs.
Protesters chanted, “Vote them out” and “No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here” along the march route, which began outside Dallas City Hall.
One protest sign read, “Compassion not cruelty” while another said simply: “Vote”.
Another sign said, “November is coming.”
Protest organiser Michelle Wentz said opposition to the policy has seemed to cross political party lines. She called it a “barbaric and inhumane” policy.
Several dozen protesters gathered in front of the Border Patrol station in McAllen, Texas, near a detention center where migrant children were being held in cages.
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.
Rio Grande Valley-based attorney Jennifer Harbury says parents separated from their children are being held in “prison-like” conditions in nearby Port Isabel. She says children separated at the border should have alien registration numbers linked to their parents, but attorneys are “having terrible trouble finding these kids.”
Democratic US Senator Elizabeth Warren called for swift reunification of children and parents at a Massachusetts immigration rally.
“This is about children held in cages,” she said. “This is about mamas who want their children back.”
Starting in early May, in an attempt to staunch the flow of tens of thousands of migrants to the southern US border every month, Trump ordered the arrest of adults crossing the boundary illegally, including those seeking asylum.
Many trying to cross the US-Mexico border are destitute people fleeing gang violence and other turmoil in Central America.
As a result of Trump’s crackdown, distraught children were separated from their families and, according to widely broadcast pictures, held in chain-link enclosures, a practice that sparked domestic and global outrage.
Last week, Mr Trump signed an order ending the separation of families but immigration lawyers say the process of doing so will be long and chaotic.
About 2,000 children remained split from their parents, according to official figures released last weekend.
More than 500 women, including a member of Congress, were arrested on Thursday in the US Capitol complex protesting Trump’s immigration policy.
Mr Trump has made fighting immigration — both illegal and legal — a major plank of his “America First” policy agenda.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) makes arrests and otherwise enforces the administration’s immigration crackdown, but an emerging coalition of politicians, activists and pro-immigrant protesters has begun calling for the dismantling of ICE.
Critics say the agency has treated some would-be immigrants cruelly and unfairly.
“Occupy ICE” camps have been set up in several US states.
One of the first voices to call for the abolition of ICE was New York Democratic gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon.
She has since been joined by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who told radio station WYNC, “You need some kind of agency to deal with immigration, but ICE is not that”; and by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, also of New York, who in a tweet called ICE “a cruel deportation force.”
On Saturday, Mr Trump tweeted support for ICE, saying “radical left Dems want you out. Next it will be all police. Zero chance, it will never happen!”
The political backlash against ICE is so intense that members of the agency’s criminal investigative division have asked Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to split them off as a separate agency, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.
The Post said the request came from the majority of special agents in charge of the Homeland Security Investigative Division, which handles transnational investigations related to counter-terrorism, narcotics and human trafficking.
Originally published as Demonstrators march across America to protest Trump’s hard line immigration policies
Sick rumour about teen spreads like wildfire
An 18-year-old student says she is the “victim of a co-ordinated cyber attack” over a sick rumour that spread like wildfire across social media.
‘Some chance’: Albo’s big Mardi Gras wish
While revellers lit up Sydney’s Oxford St for the 47th Mardi Gras parade, all eyes were peeled for a surprise appearance from Kylie Minogue. See all the pics here.