On Thursday, February 16, naturalized citizens, permanent residents and even undocumented immigrants banded together across the country in a protest to show the country and especially our controversial president, Donald Trump, that a day without immigrants affects the country much more than he believes.
A Day Without Immigrants protest started as a movement on social media that grew and escalated into a full blown out protest across the country in major cities including Washington D.C., New York City, and Austin. With Trump staying true to his promises and increasing deportations in cities with a high concentration of known undocumented immigrants throughout the last couple days, immigrants themselves decided enough was enough. Businesses shut their doors down for the day, kids of immigrants decided to not attend school and those protesting urged immigrants and supporters of immigration reform to abstain from shopping for the day. In the Pentagon the protest was extremely felt; most of their restaurants shut down for the day due to the high number of immigrants that refused to go to work for the day. The Pentagon sent out emails to its employees to expect “longer lines” at restaurants that were going to stay open throughout the protest.
Courtesy: ABC News
As an immigrant myself, I couldn’t feel prouder of the country for working together under such awful circumstances to finally stand up for ourselves and to prove that immigrants do matter. We’re people too and undocumented or not, we do our part in keeping this country alive. We deserve to not be discriminated against, especially by people who don’t understand the struggles of our parents, our grandparents and even our great-grandparents when all they wanted was a better life for themselves. I want everyone to remember, America was built by immigrants for immigrants.
If a Day Without Immigrants proves anything to this country and to our President, it’s that we’re in this for the long haul, there’s no backing down now.