It was a sweltering day, but that did not stop about 300 people from taking to the streets in New Paltz, NY on Saturday, to demand an end to 2,000 children being ripped from their mother's arms and sent to the far corners of our country with no plan to reunite them. We were protesting tender age internment camps, children being caged, parents deported without their children, indefinite family detention and the Trump/Sessions' policy of Zero Tolerance that created this crisis, chaos and cruelty.
We stand for due process for all asylum seekers which is their right under US and International law. All immigrants should be treated with fairness, respect, compassion and dignity!
Thanks to Gabriela Quintanilla, founder of Adelante Student Voices, who brought 25 or so local Dreamers with her and was interviewed on Spectrum TV. Dreamers are part of the American Family- they deserve our support and protection! Here is a video of our event taken by Beth Dulay -
https://www.facebook.com/bethubert/videos/10214518770196312/
Thanks to all who joined us and attended over 750 rallies across our country! Photos by B. Upton
If you would like to stay more involved on this critical issue locally, please send your email to anahatasun@aol.com. Thank you to Linda Abbott who initiated this event! MoveOn helped Linda and I to reach out to the thousands of local MoveOn members and we thank them.Their words below excellently sum up our renewed resolve to change Trump's immoral policies. We will not forget those children who need to be reunited with their parents! And we will remember in November!
Dear MoveOn member,
After weeks of heartbreaking images, here are some beautiful rays of hope:
In Washington, D.C., today, 35,000 demonstrators braved 96-degree temperatures to march on the White House and send a crystal-clear message: Families Belong Together. There were 30,000 participants in New York, 60,000 in Chicago, more than 70,000 in Los Angeles, and huge turnouts from Orlando, Florida, to Austin, Texas, to Boise, Idaho (which is one of the pictures above!). We were everywhere.
Here's the eye-popping map of all the protests, one dot per demonstration, spanning all 50 states, as hundreds of thousands of us gathered in cities from Antler, North Dakota, to Lake Worth, Florida:
More than 750 cities. One message. This is what it looks like when a nation speaks with one voice.
The past few weeks have been excruciating. We've learned about unspeakable abuses being perpetrated in our name. And at the same time, the Supreme Court upheld the Muslim Ban, which keeps yet more families separated. A Supreme Court retirement means fundamental rights for women and the LGBTQ+ community—among others are now on the line for a generation.
And for the thousands of parents and children in cages, not knowing if they'd ever see their family members again, it was, and remains, infinitely worse.
But today was a ray of hope.
It was a reminder that, for all the chaos and cruelty of those in power, a massive and growing movement exists in every corner of the nation that still believes in fundamental decency. It was a reminder that—at the ultimate wellspring of power in the American political system—the core values of we, the people blaze, undiminished, indivisible.
The horror that so many of us feel about the devastating policies of our government won't go away due to a march. But we are here, we are ready to fight, and we won't go away. This administration hopes to crush our will to resist. Today, we made clear that they will fail.
#FamiliesBelongTogether #ReunitetheFamilies #RememberinNovember
