When hundreds of thousands of Americans descend on the nation’s biggest cities on Saturday to protest against the separation of migrant families at the southern border, A-list celebrities will be resisting alongside them.
Donald Trump’s presidency has already galvanized enormous opposition in Hollywood, as entertainers came out in droves on the president’s second day in office to join the Women’s March last year, where between 3 and 5 million people took part in the largest single-day protest in US history. Hollywood has, in return, drawn the ire of the president, who frequently refers to celebrities, most recently Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro, as “liberals” and “elites”.
And while Saturday’s protests, dubbed the Families Belong Together march, is not expected to turn out quite as many participants as the Women’s March, politically active celebrities like Julianne Moore, America Ferrera, Padma Lakshmi, Natalie Portman and Chelsea Handler are expected to demonstrate in opposition to the “zero-tolerance” policy implemented by the president at the US-Mexico border.
Last week, amid widespread and bipartisan backlash to the separation of migrant children from their mothers, a result of the Trump administration’s decision to prosecute all undocumented immigrants crossing the border, Trump signed an executive order ending the policy. But his solution seeks to indefinitely detain families together, and the administration has thus far not been specific about plans to reunite the 2,300 children who have already been separated from their parents.
“Are we really such monsters?” asked Jessica Chastain on Twitter, while Cher, a frequent critic of the president’s, expressed concern for “terrified” children “alone in a strange country where they don’t know the language”. The director Ava DuVernay, whose documentary 13th focuses on mass incarceration, called the administration’s policies “especially chaotic and destructive” while attending a separate protest at the Freedom Plaza in Washington DC.
The last weeks have been especially chaotic and destructive. Hope wanes among even the most hopeful. But we must stay focused and wholehearted. Today’s #KeepFamiliesTogether rally did that. Respect to @FIRM_Action @CASAinAction @Re4mImmigration. Onward. ✊🏾 pic.twitter.com/V1DUCziOO1
— Ava DuVernay (@ava) June 27, 2018
America Ferrera, the actor and activist who campaigned for Hillary Clinton, implored those “pissed off that Trump has made it official US policy to separate children from parents at our border” to visit the website Families Belong Together, which organized Saturday’s day of action demanding “an end to family separation and detention”. The actor Susan Sarandon, meanwhile, was among the 575 women arrested in Washington DC on Thursday after staging a sit-in at the Hart Senate office building. “Arrested. Stay strong. Keep fighting,” Sarandon tweeted shortly after being released.
Saturday’s protests are a direct response to the administration’s immigration policies. Just last weekend, Trump suggested immigrants crossing the border illegally should be sent back to their home countries without due process, a claim he repeated when, at a rally in South Carolina, Trump rebuked the idea that more judges are needed at the southern border. “What other country has judges?” he asked, doubling down on a policy largely believed to be the product of hardliners such as the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and White House adviser Stephen Miller.
But while the separation of migrant families has mobilized many in Hollywood, Saturday’s protests are shaping up to be a repudiation of more than just the administration’s immigration policies.
Its approach to gun violence and reproductive rights has also come under scrutiny, especially in the wake of Thursday’s shooting at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis and the announcement that Justice Anthony Kennedy is stepping down from the supreme court. His vacated seat allows Trump to appoint a second conservative justice to the bench, which has many worried about the future of abortion rights in the US.
“We must fight fire with fire,” wrote Debra Messing on Instagram. “Civil Rights as we know them will be chipped away.” Olivia Wilde, who attended the gun violence-focused March for Our Lives rally in Los Angeles in March, addressed the future of Roe v Wade on Twitter: “It is not a question of abortions or no abortions,” she said. “It is only a question of whether women will die having them.” Others, like the comic Kathy Griffin, expressed hope that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would remain on the bench long enough to safeguard women’s rights to terminate unwanted pregnancies.
Griffin, who last year was widely condemned for posing with a mask of Donald Trump’s “severed” head, has found herself a frequent target of the right in the Trump era. The response to the photo op, condemned by the president and his family members, exemplifies the contentious relationship between the president and the entertainment industry.
Earlier this week, that relationship was further inflamed when the Republican National Committee released a new campaign advertisement called The Left in 2018: Unhinged. The video, made up of various clips of celebrities lashing out at President Trump, features Griffin, Samantha Bee, Madonna, Johnny Depp and Michelle Wolf, the comic whose jokes about the press secretary, Sarah Sanders, landed her in hot water.
Where members of the entertainment industry have been especially vocal, and sometimes profane, in their criticism of the president, Trump has fought fire with fire on Twitter, calling De Niro a “very low IQ individual”, Wolf a “filthy comedian” and Alec Baldwin “unwatchable”.
The president, however, will probably be watching on Saturday as thousands turn out for a protest that was initially focused on immigration and has grown to encompass a number of causes, including gun violence and women’s rights.
Organized by the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the ACLU, the Women’s March and MoveOn, the Families Belong Together march will take place in nearly 700 cities worldwide, with the main event taking place in the nation’s capital.
