‘This Is My Home’: Thousands In D.C. Take To The Streets To Protest Trump’s Invasion and Trampling of Freedoms
“It's not the first, and it won't be the last,” one demonstrator said. “We’re gonna march until we free D.C. and we also give the people of D.C. the freedom that they deserve.”
Donald Trump’s unjustified invasion of the nation’s capital has been losing in both the legal courts and the court of public opinion. Local residents continued to show their opposition to the federal government’s occupation during the massive “We Are All DC” protest over the weekend, which brought together community groups, unions, non-profits, faith-based organizations and neighbors to demand the return of their beloved city.
“Behind a bright red banner reading ‘END THE D.C. OCCUPATION’ in English and Spanish, protesters marched over two miles from Meridian Hill Park to Freedom Plaza near the White House to rail against the fourth week of National Guard troops and federal agents patrolling D.C.’s streets,” the AP reported. The demonstration, led by a diverse roster of organizations that included the ACLU, Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, CASA, Greenpeace USA, SEIU, Veterans for Peace, and the Washington Interfaith Network, “was perhaps the most organized demonstration yet against Trump’s federal intervention in Washington.”
The message from many demonstrators was clear: this federal incursion is unacceptable and they will continue resisting until they get their city back.
“Jun Lee, a printmaker artist living in Washington, showed up with a ‘Free DC’ sign that she made on a woodcut block,” the AP continued. “She said she came to the protest because she was ‘saddened and heartbroken’ about the impact of the federal intervention on her city.”
“This is my home, and I never, ever thought all the stuff that I watched in a history documentary that I’m actually living in person,” Lee continued, “and this is why this is important for everyone, this is our home, we need to fight, we need to resist.” Natasha Sakolsky, a Silver Spring resident, told NBC Washington she “would've never imagined having the National Guard in place in this town terrorizing people.” Like Lee, Sakolsky urged solidarity among neighbors.
“We want unification, and that's what you'll see here today, I think already, just the diversity of the different groups coming out,” she said.
The legal authority that the administration weaponized in order to justify this invasion is set to expire this week. But laws be damned, Trump on Monday appeared to newly threaten to continue his occupation anyway. What he’s really threatening is more lost business, more kidnappings of workers, more attacks on people of faith, and more terrified schoolchildren so he can continue his authoritarian aspirations.
“America’s Voice has long said that immigration was merely the ‘tip of the spear’ for this administration to justify and lead an attack on all of us – including due process, constitutional rights and core democratic norms and pillars, such as deploying the military against American communities,” America’s Voice Executive Director Vanessa Cárdenas said Monday. “Sadly, all are coming to pass.”
While Trump’s invasion might be popular with the Cabinet sycophants who are more focused in in protecting his feelings than protecting the American people, out here in the real world, folks who value their freedoms and communities simply aren’t on board.
“A new Quinnipiac poll finds that Americans oppose Trump’s move to send troops to the streets of Washington, DC by a 15-point margin, with independents rejecting the move by nearly 30 points,” as Jamison Foser wrote in his Finding Gravity newsletter. “That’s despite the fact that Quinnipiac’s poll question was biased in Trump’s favor.” Emerson College Polling similarly found a plurality of respondents, 48%, disapproving of National Guard colluding with ICE. And a third poll, from Data for Progress, “finds that a majority of voters (51%) oppose the Trump administration taking over the Washington, D.C., police force and deploying the National Guard in the city.”
Following June’s historic “No Kings” rallies and last weekend’s demonstrations, residents in the district – and all across the country – aren’t finished showing their displeasure with the administration’s agenda of masked kidnappings, chaos, and the attempt to consolidate power at cost to our freedoms. At the end of last month, Home of the Brave launched a billboard campaign in the district condemning the administration’s use of secretive police. Home of the Brave’s advisory board includes retired police officers Harry Dunn and Michael Fanone, who were brutally assaulted while attempting to defend democracy on January 6. Trump subsequently pardoned these cop-beaters, as well as Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. But he’s keeping our communities safe, amirite?
“There’s no justification for using federal law enforcement and National Guardsmen as political pawns,” Fanone said. “But as long as they’re here, it’s imperative that officers conduct themselves professionally—and that starts with showing their faces.”
And, next month on October 18th, “No Kings” organizers plan to stage another another weekend of protests with a goal “to outshine the original, amid revulsion to Trump’s brutal campaign of mass deportation led by masked agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and an increasingly lawless president who claims “a lot” of Americans would “like a dictator,” Rolling Stone reports.
“I hope to see these protests explode on the national scene — and demonstrate that the public is not with this regime, that the public wants free-and-fair elections, that the public wants the overreach of the federal government out of their cities, and that they don’t support terrorizing forces in their communities. It’s not rocket science,” Indivisible's Ezra Levin told the outlet.
And as both Levin and The New Republic’s Greg Sargent note, Trump’s actions are coming from a place of weakness. “On one side, Trump is buffoonishly boasting of his highest poll numbers ever while obsequious Republicans applaud the two-bit tinpot's self-flattery,” Sargent writes. “On the other side, he's tanking on all major issues,” including on immigration, which the conventional wisdom holds is one of his strongest issues. Not so, according to recent polling. As data scientist G. Elliot Morris noted in June, media coverage of Maryland dad Kilmar Ábrego García hurt Trump. People are angry – and they’re going to keep speaking out in defense of their rights and the rights of their neighbors.
“We say courage is contagious,” Levin continued to Rolling Stone. “Trump is a bully, and bullies often change direction if you stand up to them. And look: The attacks coming from this regime don’t come from a place of strength. Trump does not have popular support for occupying American cities. He doesn’t have popular support for secret police.”
The “We Are All DC” protest is “not the first, and it won't be the last,” demonstrator Jaime Contreras told NBC Washington. “We’re gonna march until we free D.C. and we also give the people of D.C. the freedom that they deserve.”
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