Big United States opposition to Trump’s xenophobia

This video says about itself:

USA: Over 1,000 protest family separation in Brownsville

29 June 2018

Over 1,000 people protested outside the federal courthouse for the Southern District of Texas in Brownsville on Thursday, decrying the separation of undocumented children from their parents.

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) National Campaigns Director Natalie Montelongo attended the protest. She said: “there was a recent injunction that happened two nights ago that demanded that children under five be reunited within 14 days and the rest of the children within 30 days, but we must continue vocalising our views and mobilising in action to make sure the administration implements that.”

Here are the best pictures from the “Families Belong Together” marches over the weekend.

By E.P. Milligan and Patrick Martin in the USA:

Opposition mounts to Trump administration’s persecution of immigrants

30 June 2018

A wave of protests began Thursday over the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy that has resulted in the separation of over 2,000 immigrant children from their families. The demonstrations across the country foreshadow the national day of action in defense of immigrants scheduled today.

More than 1,000 demonstrated in Brownsville, Texas, a city located on the border with Mexico. Brownsville emerged as a major focal point of popular anger due to the existence of a mass child detention center within the city. The facility, located in a converted Wal-Mart shopping center, currently holds around 1,500 immigrant boys in hellish conditions. Organizers of the protest played a widely shared audio clip of detained immigrant children crying for their parents. The clip evoked a deep emotional response from the crowd, with many in attendance bursting into tears themselves.

Hundreds of women staged a sit-in occupation of the Senate’s Hart Office Building in Washington, D.C., following a morning of protests and marches in D.C. from Freedom Plaza to the Department of Justice as well as Congress. D.C. police responded to the action with mass arrests, taking 575 women into custody—more than twice the number arrested during protests surrounding Donald Trump’s inauguration.

The Washington protest was organized by groups close to the Democratic Party, and at least one congresswoman, Representative Pramila Jayapal, was among those arrested, along with actress Susan Sarandon and other prominent liberals. Its purpose was to associate the Democrats with the mass opposition to the Trump administration’s policy, although in substance, if not rhetoric, the Trump policy is a continuation of the mass deportations and abusive treatment of immigrants under Barack Obama.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers set up a barricade in front of the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. a day ahead of the Saturday protests. The agency sealed off the building, claiming protesters planned to occupy it. Officers erected temporary fencing outside the building and set up a perimeter patrol blocking the entrance.

ICE facilities in a number of cities have seen operations disrupted or blocked outright by protesters. The longest blockade has been in Portland, Oregon, where a tent city has been erected, cutting off access to an ICE office, halting the operation of immigration courts. Federal Protective Service officers moved in on Thursday, clearing the part of the encampment that was on property leased by the federal government.

Similar encampments have been erected outside of ICE buildings in larger cities like Los Angeles and New York, and there have been widespread smaller protests.

Protesters in Grand Rapids, Michigan occupied a Board of Commissioners meeting concerning Kent County’s contract with ICE. After the meeting was suspended, around 100 protesters marched on a major intersection chanting “ICE out of Kent County.” Police arrested seven protesters who walked into the intersection and began blocking traffic.

Trump has been quick to react to the wave of protests, urging the police to use violence and intimidation to suppress the growing discontent. “Leftwing Activists are trying to block ICE officers from doing their jobs and publicly posting their home addresses – putting these selfless public servants in harm’s way”, he tweeted. “These radical protesters want ANARCHY – but the only response they will find from our government is LAW AND ORDER!”

Though Trump signed an executive order on June 20 that ended the official separation of children from their parents, thousands of children still remain in detention facilities with no outside contact. So far, only five have been reunited with their families. The vast majority of children remain in the bureaucratic legal quagmire of the deportation machine, while parents have little to no way to locate and contact them. Because detainees may frequently await processing for years or even go “missing”, it is likely some families will never be reunited.

On June 26, a federal judge in San Diego issued a court order with nationwide effect, requiring the Trump administration to reunite all children younger than five with their detained parents by July 10, and all children five and older by July 26. This was widely interpreted in the media and in legal circles as effectively requiring the imminent release of the detained parents, since under terms of a consent decree entered into by the federal government some 20 years ago, known as the Flores agreement, children may not be detained in federal immigration facilities for more than 20 days.

However, the Washington Post reported late Friday that the Trump administration is proposing instead to modify the Flores agreement so that parents and children can be detained together indefinitely.

According to papers filed with the San Diego federal court, the Justice Department gave the following notice to the judge who issued the June 26 order, Dana Sabraw: “The government will not separate families but detain families together during the pendency of immigration proceedings when they are apprehended at or between ports of entry.”

As the Post explained, “The new filing does not explicitly say the Trump administration plans to hold families in custody beyond the 20-day limit, but by saying officials plan to detain them ‘during the pendency’ of immigration proceedings, which in many cases can last months, they imply that families will spend that time in detention.”

In other words, the Trump “solution” to the cruelty of family separation is the provocation of family imprisonment, jailing teenagers, younger children, even babies along with their parents. Once this new posture becomes more widely known, it is bound to inflame popular hostility to the vicious anti-immigrant bigotry and repression unleashed by the White House.

A Pew Reports poll issued this week found broad and growing sympathy for immigrants, both “legal” and “illegal”, and widespread rejection of the lying propaganda of Trump, such as his claims that immigrants are responsible for crime or that they take the jobs of American workers. Trump’s efforts to whip up anti-immigrant hysteria appeal to only a small minority of the population, but he relies on the cowardice and complicity of both the Democratic Party and the corporate media.

The Democratic Party is posturing as the ally of the growing movement in defense of immigrants partly for its immediate electoral purposes, but mainly to block any wider challenge to the repressive anti-immigrant policies that both corporate-controlled parties support.

Many prominent Democratic politicians, such as New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, the newly nominated Democratic candidate for Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her defeated rival Representative Joseph Crowley (D-New York), have embraced the call to “abolish ICE.”

True for Ocasio-Cortez. Not true for Crowley. Though Crowley criticized ICE during his primary election campaign, he opposed abolishing it.

All are opposed, however, to any policy of “open borders” that would allow immigrants to come and go freely and live and work in the country of their choice. Instead, the Democratic Party merely seeks to rebrand ICE and CPB. “You need some kind of agency to deal with immigration, but ICE is not that”, de Blasio said on The Brian Lehrer Show on WYNC.

Reports from New York City reveal the Trump administration and its Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs are continuing their attacks on immigrant refugee children. The victims include youth who reached the United States unaccompanied by their parents, as well as children separated from their parents by the US government. NY1 has posted video of children, sent almost 2,000 miles from the Texas border to New York City, being led in the dead of night through East Harlem streets to the Cayuga Center that arranges foster care. This was followed by a report revealing that 466 students from New York City and surrounding counties, who were no longer showing up at their schools between last October and March, had in fact been taken into custody by ICE agents, but the federal government was not reporting this to the schools or to city or state agencies: here.

In a column in the Guardian July 5, (“Protest all you like, Susan Sarandon. In effect you work for Trump”), commentator Marina Hyde asserted that American actress Susan Sarandon was an “asset” of Donald Trump. Sarandon’s great crime? Failing to endorse Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, and instead calling for a vote for Jill Stein of the Green Party. The event that immediately occasioned Hyde’s indignation was Sarandon’s arrest June 28 at a protest in Washington against Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policies and the brutal breaking up of immigrant families: here.