Saturday, June 30th, 2018:
Nearly 500 people gathered in downtown Billings this Saturday, joining a nationwide movement admonishing the Trump Administration’s recent immigration policy of separating parents and children at the Mexico border.
Organized by state Representative Jessica Karjala and Billings City Councilwoman Penny Ronning, the event garnered support from various local organizations, including Planned Parenthood, Forward Montana, the Montana Human Rights Network, the Montana Racial Inequality Project, and the Montana Chapter of the ACLU. While the 90-minute rally was officially set to begin at noon, by 11:30 the courthouse lawn had already been overtaken by booths handing out immigration information, free food and water and collecting donations for RAICES, an organization devoted to providing legal services to detained immigrants and reuniting separated children and parents.
While Montana is one of the farthest states from the southern border, the call to end the family separation policy strikes a personal chord, as the state has a long-standing history of forcefully separating children from their families.
“I know a story of an 8-year old girl who was forcibly taken from her family, drug down the hallways of her school and she never saw her family again until she was a teenager,” state Representative Rae Peppers spoke to the crowd, describing the experience of a young girl held captive in a Montana boarding school. “One day that girl walked out of the schoolyard in December and realized she could go home again. That girl was me.”
Peppers is a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, located a little over 100 miles from Billings. She had a more formal speech prepared for the rally, but just before she was called to speak, she put her prepared speech in her pocket and used her time onstage to draw parallels between her own experience of being forcibly separated from her family and the plight of children separated at the border.
At the end of her speech, she referred to the June 20 order signed by the President, titled “Affording Congress an Opportunity to Address Family Separation,” calling the order nothing more than a way for Trump to finally have the leverage needed to complete his border wall.
“Shame on him,” Peppers said to the crowd, while a deaf and hard of hearing interpreter emphasized each word at the front of the stage. “We are not bargaining chips, we are people, with dreams and lives of our own. Shame. On. Him.”
Both Councilwoman Penny Ronning and Amy Aguirre, co-founder of Billings Sanctuary Rising, addressed the unique challenges of women and children fleeing their countries. Ronning highlighted the prevalence of violence in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, the home countries of many children in the detention center, while Aguirre underlined the difficult and near impossible choices faced by parents, emphasizing the abuse endured by girls in Central American Countries.
“What would you do?” She asked the crowd. “When violence reaches this kind of magnitude, would you be willing to stay put and work it out? Would you be willing to to risk your children’s safety and future while you wait for the government in the U.S. to do something, when it has been known to take decades for those kids of applications to be approved?”
“These people seeking asylum are mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, uncles and aunts, grandmas and grandpas. They are us.” She ended her speech to a cheering a crowd and a chorus of honking car horns.
Debbie Macias Brown, Vice Chair of Not in Our Town Billings, spoke to the crowd from her perspective as a Mexican-Korean American. “My family means everything to me. They’re the guiding light, the support system.” Debbie spoke of her mother, and the importance of keeping that guiding light alive. “Keeping children from their parents doesn’t make America great,” she continued. “Neither does holding them in cages. Keeping families together makes us great.”
Angelina Gonzalez-Aller, an educator with the Montana Racial Equity Project echoed Brown’s sentiments, drawing focus to the intent of the policy, calling it an “extremist political strategy to draw attention to the southern border.”
“Well it certainly worked. We are paying attention,” She said. “There’s a crisis on the border. A crisis of morals playing out in real time.”
All of Montana’s congressional representatives were invited to the rally, and while none made an appearance, Kathleen Williams, the Democratic challenger hoping to unseat Gianforte in the U.S. House of Representatives this November, did attend and address to the crowd, calling for bipartisan support for families to be kept together. Senator Jon Tester sent a letter to be read on his behalf, where he expressed support for a safe border and the reunification of families.
After speeches, a group call to action took place, where slips of paper were passed around with representative contact information. Brown, Peppers, and others assisted people in contacting their representatives. For 20 minutes, people collectively called, tweeted and emailed their Congressional representatives, demanding an end to the family separation policy, support for compassionate and comprehensive immigration reform, and a path to citizenships for Dreamers – a term commonly given to the over 800,000 young people who entered into the United States as children who are protected under the DACA program, but denied legal status or a pathway to citizenship.
Gonzalez-Aller ended her speech with one specific request: stop by one of the booths and register to vote.
“This is not a political battle, this is a moral one,” she told the crowd. “This is a battle for the soul of a nation and Montana has a message for Washington: we are watching, and we will remember in November.”
Trikle Trade
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jennamartinphoto
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