Thousands Protest Against Trump's Immigration Policy

SAN DIEGO, CA -- Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of San Diego Saturday in two rallies to protest immigration policies that separated more than 2,300 children from their parents. The marches, in downtown San Diego and Otay Mesa, already had been planned when President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday intended to end family separation at the border.

The order doesn't change the Trump administration's zero tolerance policy for prosecuting all unauthorized border crossings -- families will simply be detained together, rather than separated.

Federal agencies are working on a reunification process and about 500 children have been returned to their families since May, according to news reports.

As many as 5,000 people took part in the Families Belong Together rally, which started around 10 a.m. near the downtown San Diego Civic Center and finished with a march to the San Diego field office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Front Street.

Wendy Batterson -- a leader of San Diego Indivisible, which planned the action -- was one of several speakers at the march.

Batterson told the San Diego Union-Tribune that "the rally is not a political rally, it's a rally about humanity."
"I want people to help me say no to separating families," Batterson said. "Now we are criminalizing families and using it as an excuse to lock them up and keep them in detention centers as families."

Rep. Scott Peters, D-San Diego, told rally-goers that Donald Trump has "shamed the office of the president," the Union-Tribune reported. "We are brokenhearted, we are ashamed and we are furious, and now we are charged with nothing less than saving our democracy."

A watch commander at the San Diego Police Department said he was unaware of any arrests stemming from the protest.

The South Bay rally kicked off a few hours later, at 1 p.m.

Organizers planned to march from a location on Otay Mesa Road to the Otay Mesa Detention Center, where some migrant mothers who had been separated from their children were being held.

California Highway Patrol officers and San Diego County sheriff's deputies were called around 1:05 p.m. to monitor protesters marching in the roadway toward the detention center, according to sheriff's Lt. Amber Baggs.

There were at least two different groups protesting in front of the detention center, including a handful of people who were blocking an exit to the facility, according to media reports.

Baggs said around 5 p.m. that she wasn't aware of anyone being arrested.

Participating organizations included faith-based social justice groups PICO California and the San Diego Organizing Project.

"What we've been seeing with the Trump administration's family separation policies -- and Jeff Sessions' use of the Bible to defend them -- is truly horrific," Father Neal Jose Wilkinson of the San Diego Organizing Project said prior to the march. "Children do not belong in detention centers. They belong with their families."

The march comes on the heels of U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris' visit on Friday to the detention center.

It isn't the first time the federal government has detained migrant children and families, however.

In 2014, the Obama administration placed more than 7,000 migrant children, who crossed the border without adult family members, in temporary shelters on military bases in California, Texas and Oklahoma for about four months.

--City News Service/Photo by Jason Houck