Dozens rally in DeKalb County in ‘A Day Without Immigrants' protest
On Monday, immigrants in cities across the country and in the metro Atlanta area participated 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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He further hopes that people with this misconception eventually come to see very little distinction between an impassioned protest and a riot. Once that happens, he knows they're more likely to broadly tolerate and acclimate to the kinds of strongman responses that we're currently seeing. Americans also disagree widely on when protests are appropriate. A poll conducted in 2023 by YouGov found that people are more likely to find protest tactics acceptable when those tactics are in support of a cause they favor. Apparently, many people wish for those who disagree with them to package their dissent as unassumingly as possible, ideally making it invisible and inaudible. But some politicians seem almost giddy when their political enemies demonstrate. In the recent protests in L.A., Trump saw a prime opening to send in the National Guard and later Marines, finally scratching an itch he has had — dating back to the summer of 2020 when protesters fanned out across the nation to protest George Floyd's murder — to use military force on American soil. L.A., of course, is something of a vanguard when it comes to protests, and in particular to protests that devolve into riots. The city's civic meltdowns have typically been measured in terms of people killed and property damaged. The Watts riots in 1965, sparked by police brutality against the city's Black population, killed 34 people and caused $40 million in damage (equivalent to around $300 million today). In the 1992 L.A. riots, another act of resistance in response to police brutality against Black people, 63 people were killed, and losses reached up to a staggering $1 billion (around $2 billion today). Fortunately, so far, there have been very few injuries reported in the current demonstrations, and no deaths. There is no sense yet of the property toll, which is sure to draw a lot of attention from those intent on demonizing the protesters and their cause. Our real focus should be on the psychological toll. One large study of mental health outcomes following various protests determined that the prevalence of major depression in the affected community increased by 7%, irrespective of how personally involved an individual was in the protest. The prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder ranges from 4% to a stunning 41% in areas affected by protests, riots and revolutions. And those impacts also radiate to the law enforcement officers who intervene. For example, in a study of LAPD officers following the 1992 riots, 17% subsequently showed symptoms aligned with post-traumatic stress disorder, including avoidance and emotional resignation. Similar results were observed among law enforcement in Ferguson, Mo. in 2014, following riots there in the aftermath of the murder of a Black teen, Michael Brown. More recently, U.S. Capitol officers reported PTSD-like symptoms after the Trump-inspired insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. A major trope in American politics and among free speech advocates is that dissent makes for a healthy democracy. But too much of anything — especially dissent — has become an albatross on the American psyche. And there are deepening consequences to our seemingly never-ending dissent: It's likely to continue coming in the form of protests and riots. In the eyes of the average American, the U.S. has been in a perpetual state of unrest for at least the last decade. In the last five years alone, the U.S. has been convulsed by coast-to-coast protests — in the aftermath of Floyd's murder in Minneapolis at the hands of police, in response to Israel's ongoing assault on Gaza, and now in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the U.S. over ICE's feckless immigration raids. When the smoke clears, psychological trauma lingers in those who were on the protest grounds, and even those vicariously exposed to it through social media and TV reports. If the response to protests or riots is militarization, and we normalize it, Pandora's box will be opened. It perhaps already has been with Trump's quixotic decision to send unneeded troops to L.A. The militarization of a community, whether in the form of short-term interventions or long-term occupations, is rarely received well by those who must live with it. At best, we consider intrusions by policing officials a necessary evil. At least when it comes to our own communities, most of us appear to prefer to live in spaces that are reasonably policed but still governed by elected representatives. We're at a precarious moment now when we can envision how that could be lost — as we see Trump's effort to militarize Los Angeles and America more broadly through ICE and other authoritarian intimidation tactics. However one feels about the backlash against ICE, or the federal government's reaction to those protesters supporting their immigrant neighbors, most of us likely agree that the political theater and the clashes in the street are bad for the nation — and preventable. With the ultimate hope of removing the need for protests like these, I'm reminded of what a research participant once told me: We have just as much capacity to create trauma for one another as we have to eliminate it. Jerel Ezell is an assistant professor and the director of the Center for Cultural Humility at UC Berkeley. He studies the racial and cultural aspects of politics. If it's in the news right now, the L.A. Times' Opinion section covers it. Sign up for our weekly opinion newsletter. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
