Dozens rally in DeKalb County in ‘A Day Without Immigrants' protest
Immigrants and those who support them were instructed not to work, spend money or go to school.
'Showing folks in Georgia and around the country just how important immigrants are in every facet of society,' Kyle Gomez-Leineweber, Director of Policy and Advocacy at GALEO told Channel 2's Audrey Washington.
GALEO is a Latin community development fund that works to increase leadership.
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'We're seeing narratives that are simply false and targeting the immigrant community,' Gomez-Leineweber said.
Organizers said both the protest and the rally are in response to what they consider to be escalating attacks on immigrants across the country and in metro Atlanta.
During the last 'Day Without Immigrants' protest in February, Georgia GOP Chairman Josh McKoon addressed targeted ICE arrests and the subsequent protests that followed.
'I think there is going to be a short-term blip as people understand what is actually going on,' McKoon said. 'This administration is removing dangerous threats to our community, criminal, illegal aliens. People who are in the country legally have nothing to be afraid of.'
But rally organizer Natalie Villasana told Washington what's going on is a nationwide push back from immigrants to ultimately send a message.
'We're saying an end to mass deportation, abolish ICE and full rights to all immigrants,' Villasana said.
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Hitler's Germany, Netanyahu's Israel, Trump's America: Terrifying parallels
History, when forgotten or distorted, often returns – not as memory but as repetition. The dehumanising machinery of fascist regimes begins not in death camps, but in the use of denigrating, inflammatory language. In Nazi Germany, it began with the labelling of Jews, Roma (Gypsies) and other non-Aryans as 'Ausländers' – outsiders, unworthy of national inclusion. In 21st-century America, President Donald Trump's labelling of black and brown immigrants as 'illegals', 'animals' and 'invaders' echoes this extremely dangerous rhetoric. These parallels demand not only remembrance but immediate action. The use of language in pursuing an agenda of exclusion and oppression is more than adequately defined by Professor Edward Said in his book Covering Islam. In Adolf Hitler's Germany, for example, the SS (Schutzstaffel) was a feared state paramilitary apparatus responsible for enforcing racial purity, rounding up Jews in particular, and orchestrating deportations and genocide. Their targets were first demonised through massive propaganda campaigns, as Iran is today, then criminalised through law and finally liquidated under state policy. In modern-day America, immigration and customs enforcement (ICE) has similarly operated as a tool of ideological enforcement. Under the Trump administration, ICE raids are tearing through communities, workplaces, schools and homes. Immigrants, many of them long-time residents, workers and parents, are being detained and jailed in substandard conditions, herded on to flights in handcuffs, and deported without due process. Jeenah Moon / Reuters The comparison lies not in methods of extermination in this instance, but in the political and legal mechanisms of dehumanisation. The SS was, and now ICE is, empowered by legislation, normalised by political rhetoric by supposedly sane legislators and sustained by a large part of mainly white society willing to turn away from this reality. In occupied Palestine, we continue to witness a third iteration of the Ausländer doctrine. Zionist Israeli propaganda continues to cast Palestinians, especially in Gaza, as an alien threat to the Jewish state. Under the pretext of defence and divine entitlement, Israel has destroyed homes, restricted movement, detained children and killed thousands of civilians in operations that bear a stark resemblance to collective punishment. READ: Netanyahu slams French proposal to recognise Palestinian state as 'launch pad to annihilate Israel' The ongoing siege and massacre of innocents in Gaza – and now the terror on civilians in the West Bank – is not a spontaneous response to violence; it is a systematised policy of domination and de-Arabisation designed as Plan Dalet by David Ben Gurion in 1947/8. Just as Hitler used the language of 'lebensraum' (living room) to justify expansion, Zionism invokes biblical claims to deny Palestinian sovereignty and existence. Palestinians are vilified in the media, denied the right of return, labelled 'terrorists' by default and kept in ghettos behind walls. The echoes of Jewish suffering in Europe should not have been a shield for Israeli policy. It should have been a cautionary tale – a lesson to be learnt and not to be repeated. During Hitler's rise, many ordinary Germans supported or tolerated discriminatory policies. Anti-Jewish laws were passed with little opposition. When the trains to Auschwitz ran, the silence of the public enabled genocide – as is the silence or complicity of most 'civilised' western nations and Arab oligarchs seeking to protect and enhance their control of resource-rich nations. In the US today, congressional support for anti-immigrant enforcement has bipartisan roots. Approved budgets are funding mass deportations, detention camps and border militarisation. While outrage flares on social media, legislative support for these actions continues unabated. An ever-growing military machine continues to get billions more to remain the chief hegemon – a deeply debt-ridden 'superpower'. Even more disturbing is how many American Jews, who once experienced the sharp edge of exclusion and extermination, now back a state that echoes those same exclusionary ideologies driven by powerful lobby groups – chief among which is the well-funded American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Support for Zionist aggression in Gaza and the West Bank often comes from precisely those people whose ancestors were themselves cast as outsiders. What ties these histories together is the dangerous process of labelling human beings as others. Whether called 'Ausländers', 'illegals' or 'threats', the language opens the door to policies that strip people of dignity, rights and, ultimately, life. The lesson is not that all oppressors are the same, but that the structure of oppression is terrifyingly repeatable. Refusing to see these signs opens the doors to allow the cycle to continue. If state violence is excused based on race, religion or national identity, this legitimises the very ideologies once condemned. ICE is not the SS. Gaza is not Auschwitz. But the immoral architecture, use of fear, division and silence are very familiar and concerning. The question is not whether history is repeating itself. The question is whether the world is brave enough to stop it.
