Apparently, few agree with the suggestion President Donald Trump pushed this past Friday that his declaration of a national emergency over the supposed crisis at the southern border is no big deal. He’s now facing protests across the country this Monday over his move, which is meant to allow for him to use executive power to redirect billions in already appropriated government funds towards building his long-sought border wall blocking off Mexico.
MoveOn.org — one of the advocacy organizations helping push protests — asserted:
‘Donald Trump has declared a #
FakeNationalEmergency—an illegal power grab from an unhinged man to push his racist, dangerous policies. We’re mobilizing rapid-response events on Presidents Day—Monday, 2/18—against Trump’s fake crisis and racist deportation force and to stand with immigrant, Muslim, and Black and brown communities to stop Trump’s dangerous and illegal power grab.’
As they indicate, Trump continues to target minority communities with essentially no tangible basis for his actions. Reporters confronted him Friday with the data from his own administration that counters his narrative that undocumented immigration and the southern border are associated with high crime rates, but he dismissed the numbers as false, only citing “many” supposed — but in reality elusive at best — stats from inside the government to back him up.
As of Sunday afternoon, there were a whopping more than 200 apparent protests planned around the country against Trump’s declaration of emergency just according to MoveOn.org, with others emerging elsewhere, like at rallylist.com. Many of the events will be taking place at noon local time.
Trump has already faced protests over the emergency declaration. Outside the Trump International Hotel in Manhattan, a number of people were even taken into custody while demonstrating on Friday, although the NYPD didn’t provide any apparent comment on the situation as of Sunday afternoon.
Protests against Trump are certainly nothing new. In the past, he’s suggested that they were shows of faked opposition drummed up by angry liberal groups with plenty of cash to spare, but while such groups did participate at some points — including via means like offering the directory of protests that MoveOn.org has — the suggestion that they’re paying protesters or anything of the sort is ludicrous.
Trump and his policy positions are just that legitimately unpopular.
He’s already faced a number of legal challenges over his emergency declaration, including from the American Civil Liberties Union, the advocacy group Public Citizen (which already abruptly filed their suit, ending up first out of the gate), and even California state Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who said Sunday that a lawsuit with several other states latched on against the White House would be emerging “imminently.”
To be clear — there is no national emergency at the southern border. Pressed this weekend on Fox News over the discrepancy between the actually available data and the president’s assertions, Trump adviser Stephen Miller offered simply that you “don’t know what you don’t know.”
In other words, all they’re going on for this project costing billions of dollars is a hunch that has basically no support besides racism.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
