Wednesday, September 6, 2017

DACA Demonstration in D.C. ("Up, Up with Education! Down, Down with Deportation!")

Posted By on Wed, Sep 6, 2017 at 2:07 PM

Coincidence once again placed me in D.C. at a historic moment. A little more than two years ago, I stood in front of the Supreme Court and witnessed the joyous moment when the Court moved the country forward, deciding gay marriage is legal everywhere in the U.S. Today I stood in front of Trump's White House protesting his alarming decision to move the country backward, tossing out DACA and putting its fate in the hands of a deeply divided, ineffective Congress, leaving 800,000 Dreamers and their families walking a razor's edge for the next six months as they wait to see if they will be allowed to remain in the country legally.

Except for the White House in the background, the march and demonstration could have been in Tucson or pretty much any city in the country.

We gathered at Lafayette Park across from the White House, walked along H Street, then down 15th Street.

Chanting, we turned onto the pedestrian street in front of the White House.
Most of the chants were familiar, though a few I don't remember hearing in Tucson: "Up, up with education! Down, down with deportation!" "Stop, stop deportation! No more family separation!"

It was a moderate sized crowd at a demonstration which must have been thrown together quickly, a couple of hundred people, young and old, lots of clergy and members of pro-immigration organizations as well as unaffiliated, concerned citizens like me.

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