Immigration policy can’t be painted with a broad brush. Unfortunately, that message hasn’t quite reached the likes of Donald Trump, the newly-embattled president, who has been met with intense local and national resistance to his recent executive orders. With the stroke of a pen, Trump sent people scrambling at airports around the world, with an authoritarian edict that seemed more like 1939 than 2017. Trump’s actions are only temporarily halted by a federal court challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union.
On January 28, for example, the Arab American Action Network called for an emergency rally at O’Hare, to protest Trump’s Muslim ban. The call was answered by groups across the spectrum: the Council on American Islamic Relations, another Muslim civil-rights group, was there, but so were the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, and the Organized Communities Against Deportations, which serve populations from around the world.
—Hatem Abudayyeh, AAAN executive director
And although it might strike some as strange that a group like BYP 100, focused as it is on the struggles of black Americans, would show up to this fight, the alliance makes perfect sense, says the group’s national public policy chair, Janaé Bonsu.
She elaborates: “Volunteer as an attorney. Create movement art as an artist. Don’t think that you aren’t useful or talented enough to support. Whether you can cook or can hold a sign, you are valuable, useful, and needed.”
