WASHINGTON—Almost 10,000 people jammed two miles of a major downtown D.C. boulevard, 16th Street, on their way to the White House on Sept 6 to demand the eviction of Donald Trump’s troops from the nation’s Capital.
They marched behind a big red banner declaring, in yellow capital letters, ‘END THE D.C. OCCUPATION.” But many made it clear their fight isn’t just about the future of D.C., free from federal interference and roughhousing.
“We are all D.C.” both banners and speakers proclaimed, warning that what the white nationalist and radical right GOP president does now in D.C., he’d extend everywhere.
In Chicago, meanwhile, thousands of residents jammed streets there in open defiance of Trump’s social media threats to go to war against them. On social media, Trump declared that “Chicago is about to find out what is like to be visited by the Department of War” as he now calls the Department of Defense.
The resistance on display in Washington and Chicago is growing everywhere across the country. As one sign in Washington D.C. put it: “Democracy lives not in the hands of the powerful but in the people who dare to be heard! GOP Congress, stop all this! Shame!” It was one of the milder signs.
National and local unions, including AFL-CIO, the Service Employees, the National Writers Union, the Communications Workers, and 200 members on several buses chartered by Unite HERE Local 7 in Baltimore participated in Washington. Unions turned out marchers in Chicago, too.
“No occupation! No kidnappings! No deportations! NEVER AGAIN!!” a typical handwritten sign proclaimed.
The protests will continue nationwide, FreeDC organizers said on their website, with lobbying lawmakers today, Sept. 8, training in non-violent resistance in coming weeks and student walkouts scheduled for September 9 at four big D.C. private universities: Georgetown, Howard, George Washington and American University, in that order.
“In World War II, my dad fought fascism” in Europe “so I wouldn’t have to,” said one woman who handwrote those words on her homemade sign.
“I’m a fifth-generation Washingtonian,” another marcher told People’s World. “Waging war on your own people is not leadership. It’s tyranny.”
Trump declared a “state of emergency” in D.C., using the dog-whistle excuse of “rising crime,” almost a month ago to take over the D.C. National Guard and try to federalize the police force and import ICE agents to dragoon, drag, clobber, kidnap, and deport immigrants.
He previously invaded downtown Los Angeles and 300 Marines are still there, guarding ICE agents who beat and terrorize residents. Chicago is his next target.
Not coincidentally, all three big cities are heavily Democratic, majority people of color and have African-American mayors, making their people and politicians objects of hate by Trump, his top aide Stephen Miller and his MAGA legions.
“SEIU 1199 represents a lot of immigrants whom Trump wants to throw out of the country,” Leyla Adali of SEIU United Health Care Workers East told People’s World. “Even our members who are not immigrants are concerned.”
“I’ve lived here since 1991 and I can’t believe what this administration is doing to the people of this city,” said an American University staffer, and union member, who identified himself as JJ. “It’s changed so much for the better and it’s nothing like what he [Trump] says.”
“The Trump administration’s attempted federal takeover of Washington, D.C., law enforcement and deployment of the National Guard threatens the freedoms and economic security of working people in the District, including more than 150,000 local union members. America’s unions say: Free D.C.!” the AFL-CIO tweeted.
And almost a dozen unions had signed on as co-sponsors of the march beforehand, with some sending members to a planning session for it on September 4.
One key demand was to yank Trump’s bullying troops—National Guards imported from red states such as South Carolina—out of the nation’s capital. Another was for lawmakers, of both parties, to fully resist MAGA and its fascistic tactics. A third was to make D.C. and its 710,000 residents the nation’s 51st state.
Linked to attacks on Gaza
Some protesters linked Trump’s occupation with troops to Israel’s invasion of and occupation of Gaza. They waved Palestinian flags and chanted “Free Palestine!”
Chicagoans are bracing for what is happening in Washington D.C. where both the D.C. Guard and the imported Guards protect the ICE agents as they drag people out of cars, invade restaurants, schools and religious institutions and sweep them up prior to shipping them out of town without bothering with such niceties as search warrants, hearings, due process of law or checking their papers.
Charlotte Stone of Virginia Beach, Va., showed the Associated Press her cardboard sign: A caricature of Trump with a Hitler mustache and a message that read “Ignoring it is what the Germans did.”
Trump wants to invade Chicago next. He even posted an “artificial intelligence” tweet on his Truth Social site with him grinning through his threat in the foreground and the Chicago skyline burning in the background, a throwback to a 1979 apocalyptic movie called Apocalypse Now.
Trump’s threat that Chicago is next got the Windy City riled up, as 3,000 people marched through Pilsen and Little Village anticipating resistance to Trump’s troops. They made it clear resistance would be active and ongoing. Both are heavily Latino neighborhoods.
Gerald Floyd, a Chicago demonstrator and church leader at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church on Chicago’s South side, said, “it is great to see such a big turnout and even greater to see that people realize this is not just a fight for immigrant rights, as important as that is, but a fight for the rights of all of us. Trump is coming for everyone so we have to unite in this struggle.”
Gov. J.B. Pritzker, D-Ill., an outspoken critic of both Trump and his troops, echoed the nationwide warning in a September 6 press conference. Like D.C. and L.A., crime in Chicago—everything from burglary to murder—has fallen by a third this year, to levels below even pre-pandemic numbers, showing Trump to be a liar.
“I refuse to pretend any of this is normal. I refuse to concede that the abject cruelty that we’re seeing play out in Donald Trump’s and Stephen Miller’s policies is justified,” said Pritzker.
“I refuse to fall into…the trap that we sacrifice vital constitutional rights in the fake guise of fighting crime,” the governor said.
“Once they get the citizens of this nation comfortable with the current atrocities committed under the color of law, what comes next?”
Regarding some of what comes next, Trump has suggested that Baltimore and New Orleans could get the same occupation and treatment from his administration and his Department of War that Chicago will get and actually said on Friday that federal troops could head for Portland, Oregon, to “wipe ‘em out,” referring to protesters there. He was actually talking about, without saying so, demonstrations in the city of Portland two years ago.
Both Chicago and Illinois leaders say they will sue the Trump administration to supplement what has become massive popular opposition to his policies.
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