As mass demonstrations continue, Republicans split over anti-immigration bill

The biggest single protest action Monday came in Detroit, where a crowd numbering in the thousands—as many as 50,000, by one police estimate—marched from a Catholic Church in the Mexicantown area and rallied near the McNamara Federal Building downtown.

The huge crowd carried flags from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador as well as the United States, and signs with slogans like “We are not criminals.” An estimated half-million Latinos, US-born and immigrant, live in the state of Michigan.

The rally attracted sympathetic coverage in the local media. Father Russ Kohler, a Roman Catholic priest in a Hispanic parish, told the Detroit News he was appalled that under the proposed HR 4437, he could be considered a felon for helping a needy immigrant. Referring to the indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America, he said, “They have been here for 12,000 years and ‘Americans’ have only been here for a few hundred years. Who’s the invader here?”

Similar rallies took place Sunday and Monday in Boston, where 2,500 supporters of immigrant rights marched to the Boston Common; Columbus, Ohio; Oakland and San Francisco, California; and other cities. Boston’s rally was one of the most variegated, with the crowd including workers from Haiti, El Salvador, Brazil and Ireland, singing songs, chanting slogans and waving flags. In Washington, DC, some 1,500 immigrants demonstrated outside the US Capitol, many of them wearing symbolic handcuffs to denounce the legislation for redefining immigration violations—now considered civil infractions—as felony crimes.

In Los Angeles, scene of one of the largest demonstrations in US history Saturday, when more than half a million people marched through downtown to denounce the anti-immigrant legislation, the popular mobilization continued Monday with a series of mass walkouts by high school students.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2006/mar2006/immi-m29.shtml