St. Louis Protests Planned Over Family Separations At The Border

ST. LOUIS, MO — Nationwide protests are planned for next weekend to call for an end to the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" immigration policy that has ripped more than 2,000 children away from their parents at the U.S. southern border in recent weeks.

A protest is scheduled in downtown St. Louis for 10 a.m. Saturday, June 30, at Kiener Plaza and the Old Courthouse. So far, about 500 people say they plan to attend. Similar protests have been announced in at least 41 states. (You can find a protest near you by visiting this website.)

The Trump administration has come under intense criticism from advocates, lawmakers and citizens for the policy of separating migrant children from their families. Last week, the Department of Homeland Security announced that nearly 2,000 children had been separated at the border over the period beginning April 19 and ending in May.

The children are being housed in detention facilities that have been compared to internment camps. Many lawmakers have marched to these facilities to try and get a look at how these immigrant children are being housed. U.S. Rep. Beto O'Rourke, a Democrat from Texas, led a group of protesters to one such facility in south Texas on Father's Day. Another such facility is in Brownsville, Texas, where DHS officials arranged for reporters to tour the premises.

Jacob Soboroff, a reporter at MSNBC who toured the facility, said the some 1,500 boys living there have under 40 square feet of living space each and said the facility felt like a prison or a jail.

In chilling audio obtained by ProPublica that was recorded at a CBP facility, children can be heard crying for their parents.

The Trump administration has stood by the policy and while President Donald Trump has falsely blamed the Democrats for the separations, Stephen Miller, a senior policy advisor to Trump, told The New York Times it was a "simple decision by the administration" to have a zero-tolerance policy for illegal border crossings. At an intense press briefing on Monday, the secretary of homeland security, Kirstjen Nielsen, defended the policy. (You can see an analysis of Nielsen's defense put together by The Washington Post.)

Some, like Japanese-American actor George Takei, have compared the family separation policy to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

“At least during the internment of Japanese-Americans, I and other children were not stripped from our parents,” he wrote this week in an op-ed for the magazine Foreign Policy. “We were not pulled screaming from our mothers’ arms. We were not left to change the diapers of younger children by ourselves.”

If you're heading downtown St. Louis to protest next weekend, your best bet is to park at one of the 21 Metro Park and Ride lots in Missouri or across the river in Illinois, and take the MetroLink into downtown. Or check out getaroundstl.com for a list of downtown parking garages.

Feroze Dhanoa/Patch National Staff contributed to this reporting.

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