For senior Erica Fuentes, attending Sunday’s protest in Washington against President Trump’s immigration ban was personal.
As a daughter of parents who immigrated from El Salvador, Fuentes said immigration has always been an important issue to her. So following Trump’s executive order Friday that includes barring refugees for 120 days, Fuentes helped organize about 30 University of Maryland students to attend the march.
Fuentes said the march, which also protested a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, was “a beautiful moment to show the identity between two communities — one that is facing a Muslim ban and one that is dealing with the possibility of a wall being built along our southern border.
“Both communities face really, really similar repercussions as a result of these policies,” said Fuentes, a senior government and politics major who is also the president of this university’s Political Latinxs United for Movement and Action in Society. “Because they are being separated from people that they love.”
Protests regarding Trump’s travel ban stemmed beyond Washington, breaking out in more than 30 cities all across the country Sunday. In Washington, demonstrators marched from the White House to the Capitol and back, chanting “Shame!” along the way. Many held signs reading, “No Ban, No Wall.”
Ethan Weisbaum, a senior history major and president of J Street UMD, an activist group focusing on a two-state solution to the Israel- Palestine conflict, joined the group of university students protesting to support allowing immigrants and refugees into the country.
“The U.S. has made awful mistakes in history by refusing to allow refugees and immigrants into our country, and you can see that with the deaths that happened during the Holocaust [when] Jews were not allowed into the country on several occasions,” Weisbaum said. “And you’ve seen it through history since then.”
In addition to barring refugees from entering the country — Syrian refugees indefinitely — Trump’s order also bans citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States for 90 days. William Soergel, a senior classical languages and literatures and history major, said this part of the ban was his biggest issue.
“These are people who have been vetted, people who’ve shown their loyalty to the United States and the ideals that we all believe in, and the fact that they are treated in this way by the Department of Homeland Security and even Donald Trump,” said Soergel, the facilitator of Bisexuals at Maryland. “It does not reflect what I think is America.”
Christopher Walkup, a senior government and politics and theater major, described the mood of the march as a “crazy duality of hope and anger.” Hope in the thousands of people across the country making their voices heard, but also anger toward Trump and Republicans in Congress.
Sunday’s protest was his opportunity to take action, Walkup said. He noted people spend too much time stuck wondering what they would have done if they were alive during the humanitarian crises littered throughout U.S. history rather than focusing on the present.
“We can never know that — if we would have stood on the side of justice or the side [of] fear during those critical moments when our basic human rights and civil rights were threatened,” Walkup said. “But we can look at the contemporary civil rights and human rights problems of today and take action.”
