Families Belong Together
Families Belong Together refers both to an advocacy campaign devoted to reuniting immigrant families that were separated at the US-Mexico border by a Trump administration policy introduced in spring 2018, and also specifically to a series of protests on June 30, 2018 in Washington, D.C., New York City, and 700 other cities and towns in the United States.Very large crowds turned out to those events despite heat waves in many areas, including in Washington, D.C.[1][2][3][4] The "zero tolerance" policy[5] introduced by the Trump Administration in spring 2018 was the immediate catalyst for the Families Belong Together mass mobilization in June 2018, as media outlets began reporting on children being held in cages and in detention facilities after having been separated from their parents or guardians after crossing the border.[6] As public shock and outrage grew, a small group of women activists, advocates, and public officials[7] began conferring to organize a public response, including Anna Galland, then Executive Director at MoveOn Civic Action; Jessica Morales Rocketto, then Political Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance; Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D. Wash.); and Ai-jen Poo, Executive Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance.That group's organizing led to a call for peaceful protests on Saturday, June 30, 2018, and hundreds of thousands of people turned out for those events.[9][10] A number of prominent public figures spoke out around the time of the June 2018 protests to criticize the Trump Administration's policy.