By Michelle Railey

“You know you’re at an Indy protest when an announcement comes over the speaker and everyone stops so passengers won’t miss their flight.” (@RobertAnnis, Twitter). True story. I was there. That happened.

Links:

President Trump’s Executive Order on Immigration, Annotated (New York Times)

What It’s Like in the Seven Countries on Trump’s Travel Ban List (CNN)

This Is What it’s Like to Come to the United States as a Refugee (The Atlantic)

How Prominent Hoosiers Responded to Trump’s Executive Order (Indianapolis Star)

As Migrants Strain Border Towns, Pressure Builds on Mexico to Act (New York Times)

In Venezuela, We Couldn’t Stop Chavez. Don’t Make the Same Mistakes We Did (Washington Post)

At Indianapolis International Airport today, roughly a thousand people assembled with signs and worry to protest for human rights and to encourage those who may feel threatened now. The executive orders restricting travel, immigration, and refugee acceptance has not made many of us actually or sentimentally “safer.” Instead, we are seeing a country we love begin to lose its bearings, its long and weighty mooring in the power of due process, the belief that all men are created equal, that the innocent are, you know, innocent until proven otherwise. We Americans, many of us, believe in kindness, in helping those who suffer: give us your tired, your poor, your hungry. Allegedly that was us, once upon a time. Though, for my part, I’d rather be on the Mayflower puking my guts out than be in Aleppo any day of the most recent weeks.

We protested today: religious leaders, a Senator, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. We protested today: men, women, and children; gay, straight, trans; white, brown, black. We protested today: young, old, middle. We protested today, Hoosiers all.

You, person living elsewhere, we do not hate you. We welcome you. We would ease your suffering if we only could.

And we, all of us, we do not support what has happened to the refugee, travel, and immigration programs under the Trump administration.

That’s why we were at the airport today. I don’t know about anyone else, but I wish I could have done more.