May defends state Trump visit invitation as thousands protest US president's travel ban
Thousands of people across the country joined protests against Donald Trump’s travel ban imposed on Muslim majority states. They demonstrated in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester and other cities.
Speaking after they met on Monday, the Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny and British prime minister Theresa May reaffirmed their desire not to return to the “borders of the past” between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland after Brexit.
May brushed aside questions about her invitation to Donald Trump to conduct a state visit to the UK after more than 1.5 million people signed a petition demanding it be withdrawn.
In an emergency Commons debate on Trump’s travel ban, the former Labour leader Ed Miliband said the measure would not make the world safer. While he did not disagree with strict vetting, he insisted a blanket ban was not justified.
The foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, opposed Trump’s travel ban, calling it “divisive and wrong” in a statement to the Commons on Monday afternoon.
He insisted that the government had secured reassurances from the White House that no one carrying a British passport would be prevented from entering the USA.
Debora Kayembe, a human rights lawyer and Congolese refugee who specialises in resettling refugees in the US, won loud cheers when she told a substantial protest rally at the Scottish parliament: “I want you to understand today, that you are bigger than Mr Trump.”
Several thousand demonstrators, including students, anti-racist activists, refugees rights campaigners and political activists, had marched from a civic square at the Mound through central Edinburgh to Holyrood, shouting “say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here”.
Kayembe, who won political asylum in the UK in 2005, told the crowd: “this is about equality, fraternity and respect for each other,” before adding: “you need to be in my skin to understand how I feel every day, not being able to return home.”
Other speakers linked Trump’s ban on refugees and Muslims from seven countries entering the US to the prime minister’s official visit to meet Trump in the US last week. Rhea Wolfson, a member of Labour’s national executive committee, said: “we say it loud and clear to Theresa May: you shame yourself and you shame your country.”
The recently-formed protest group Scotland Against Trump is staging further protests in Edinburgh on 11 February, including a further demonstration outside the US consulate, scene of a rally earlier this month that drew hundreds of protestors.
This group of Londoners originally from Somalia and Libya said they were "angry and scared" by Trump. But scale of demo given them hope pic.twitter.com/zzn466KOQn
In London, the shadow home secretary Diane Abbott told the crowd of demonstrators that she had come on behalf of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Donald Trump has been president for only a few days, and look at what he is doing. We need to resist the Islamophobia and scapegoating of Muslims, we have got to resist it whether it is in the United States or here in the UK.
Demonstrations have also got underway in Glasgow, Aberdeen and Dundee.
Placards and banners were held aloft in the former as a crowd of around 500 people chanted “hope not fear, refugees are welcome here”. Demonstrations continued in George Square after a three-hour rally in Buchanan Street, Glasgow.
Julia Steinberger, an academic at Leeds University, is an American citizen and is at the march in Manchester with her 4-year-old son Jacob. Her father arrived in the US on the Kindertransport.
Julia Steinberger and her son are US citizens. Her father came to the US on the Kindertransport and she says the march feels very personal. pic.twitter.com/U88tM6Uzdj
This is very personal. Lots of people are dying because of the attitudes that Trump represents.
I don’t think I had a choice about whether or not to come here. It’s just too important. Trump is Islamophobic, but he is also anti-Semitic. I don’t think there’s a single vulnerable or minority group that he has a fondness for.
Liz Parker, 26, says it’s important that people send a message to the government that they don’t agree with Trump’s actions. “To think that people in the world think that we agree because our leader refuses to speak out about it is ridiculous.”
She says a demo like this one serves to get the message out. “Even just being here and it being in the news and on the TV means people around the world are going to see that we don’t agree with this and we want to help people. We don’t care if someone is a Muslim or a Christian or what colour their skin is. We just want to live in harmony with the human race.”
A crowd at least 2,000-strong gathered in Manchester’s Albert Square outside the city’s town hall to demonstrate against Donald Trump’s immigration directive.
The site is a stone’s throw from Lincoln Square, where a statue of US president Abraham Lincoln was erected to give thanks to Lancashire’s cotton workers for “their fight for the abolition of slavery during the American Civil War”. An economic blockade of slave-picked cotton from the southern states caused massive unemployment in the region’s cotton industry.
Clare Solomon, 43, an agency catering worker, said:
Donald Trump did not get the support of the majority of Americans who voted in the presidential election. He has even less support for his sexist, racist, war mongering, pro-business policies in this country,” she says.
The grovelling of Theresa May – who hasn’t been elected prime minister by anyone, even in her own party – is repugnant and unacceptable. Her offer of a state visit is appeasement of a reactionary bully. It should be withdrawn.
She says she hopes that tonight’s demo will only be the beginning of resistance to Trump. “Last week [at the women’s protest] we could just feel that something new was in the air,” says Solomon. “People were talking about it all over the place. In the coffee shops, on the bus this morning on the way to work ... there’s a real buzz. There’s a real feeling of anger, but also a feeling of hope that’s there’s something we can do if we all unite together.”
Dean Smith, a 24-year-old sports journalist, is the main organiser of this evening’s demo in Manchester.
On Saturday night Owen Jones arranged a similar protest in London and I saw people posting on the event page asking if there was a Manchester equivalent. I’m not really much of an activist or anything myself, I just thought someone needed to start the event, so I did it.
Smith says it was a tweet by the writer David Slack that prompted him to act on his horror at Trump’s directive.
Remember sitting in history, thinking “If I was alive then, I would’ve…”
You’re alive now. Whatever you’re doing is what you would’ve done.
It just made me think I need to do anything I can because [what Trump is doing is] wrong and it’s racist and it’s vile,” says Smith. “I think the fact that more than 2,000 people have replied to the event shows that I’m not the only one who thinks that.
More seasoned activists have since pitched in to help Smith arrange tonight’s event, which was organised in just two days.
Organised by left wing campaigners, anti-racist groups and student leaders, the demonstrators heard Maggie Chapman, a senior figure in the Scottish Greens, call for the “petulant bully” Donald Trump to be barred from visiting the Scottish parliament on his state visit to the UK.
Trump was greeted by an angry picket when he visited Holyrood to protest at Scotland’s heavy support for wind farms about five years ago.
To cheers from protesters at the Mound, Assad Khan, of Edinburgh university’s Islamic society, said: “This campaign of dehumanisation has to stop, of women, of Muslims, of the LGBT community, of disabled people, of all minority groups. It has to stop.”
Several hundred people gathered at the statue of Labour hero Aneurin Bevan to protest against Donald Trump’s travel ban. They ranged from hardened left-leaning activists to people who had never been on a demonstration before.
Student Jim Gray said he had been shopping for new trainers in the nearby St David’s centre when he saw someone walking past with an anti-Trump placard. “So I followed them and here I am. It suddenly made sense to me. I’d been worrying about the travel ban and this seems a way of making my views known. I’ve never done anything like this before.”
The protest had been organised by Ash Cox, an 18-year-old history student at Cardiff University. “I’d heard others were taking place across the UK. I thought we had to have a demonstration in Cardiff too. It took off so quickly.”
Claudia Boes, an occupational therapist, organised an anti-Trump women’s march earlier this month. “I think rather than there being individual protests, this is going to turn into a movement,” she said.
Chants that rolled up and down Queen Street in the Welsh capital included: “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA.”
Aled Edwards, the chief executive of Churches Together Wales, said: “I’ve had the privilege of working with refugees for the past 15 years and I think [Trump’s] treatment of refugees has been appalling. What you’ll find here in Cardiff, the rest of the UK and throughout the world is that enough is enough. We have to make our own personal protests.”
Omar, a 17-year-old Muslim student, said his confidence had been knocked by the start to Trump’s presidency; so much so that he asked for his surname not to be used. “I’ve travelled quite a bit in Europe and in the US. Suddenly, I’m thinking will I be able to go to the US. I was born in Cardiff. I feel British and Muslim. But what he is doing is scaring me.”
Thousands of people gathered across the UK on Monday evening to voice their opposition to Donald Trump’s travel ban targeting several Muslim majority countries.
Many went to Downing Street, where the scale of the protest appeared to take both organisers and police by surprise and, by 7pm, the crowd stretched the length of Whitehall.
Speakers, including the Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti, were barely audible above the crowd’s chants of “refugees welcome here” and “Theresa May, shame on you”. Amid the demonstrators was Browan Murphy, 17, who had travelled from East Sussex. “I have just felt I needed to do something. I am scared about what Donald Trump is doing and am angry about how Theresa May has reacted,” she said.
Lotte Rice, 28, from London, said she was also “really scared and really angry”. But she added: “It feels like this is a key time to stand up and make our voices heard. What is happening is dangerous. But, if we come together, something positive can come from this.”
The demonstration in London was one of several around the UK highlighting opposition to Trump’s executive order, issued at the weekend, which imposed a travel ban on people from several Muslim majority countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
RTE radio is reporting tonight that, for the first time in Ireland, US Homeland Security officials at Dublin airport have turned away a traveller from one of the countries on the banned list imposed by Donald Trump’s executive order.
The Department of Transport confirmed this happened at passenger clearance, which is under the control of US Homeland Security, at Dublin Airport. No details were given as to the nationality of the individual denied entry to what is effectively US territory in a section of the airport where Homeland Security officials process travellers through immigration control into the United States.
Enda Kenny defended his decision to travel to Washington DC on St Patrick’s Day, when Trump will host a party celebrate Ireland’s national day. Kenny said one of the reasons he wanted to attend the annual ceremony was to raise the plight of 50,000 undocumented Irish citizens currently living and working illegally in the United States.
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