A protest decrying U.S. President Donald Trump new policies involving refugees and migrants drew a small number of demonstrators to the corner of Guy St. and de Maisonneuve Blvd. Saturday.
Organized at the last minute by Solidarité sans frontières, the protesters, who numbered fewer than a dozen, were outnumbered by Montreal police keeping a watchful eye from a distance.
In addition to protesting the Trump’s actions, the protesters called on local governments to offset the American president’s motions by opening Canada’s borders to more migrants and refugees, and granting citizenship to the hundreds of thousands of undocumented people living in the country. Montreal should become a “solidarity city,” activist Jaggi Singh said, similar to so-called sanctuary cities in the United States that have adopted ordinances banning police and city employees from asking about the immigrant status of people they deal with.
“We can’t wait years or months to react, we have to react now, because people lives are on the line,” Singh said.
Trump ended his first week as president by enacting a 120-day ban on all refugees entering the country and a ban on immigration for residents of seven predominantly Muslim countries – Yemen, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Libya and Sudan. Earlier in the week he pleged to build his promised wall between the U.S. and Mexico, saying Mexico would pay for it.
