WASHINGTON -- Nearly 600 people were arrested by the Capitol Police on Thursday after hundreds of loudly chanting women demonstrated inside a Senate office building against President Donald Trump's treatment of migrant families.
The protests came as demonstrations occurred around the country over the Trump administration's policy of separating children from their parents at the southern U.S. border. Similar rallies are planned Saturday coast to coast.
Women sat on the floor in the 90-foot-tall atrium of the Senate Hart Office Building around Alexander Calder's black metallic Mountain and Clouds sculpture. They shouted slogans and cheered for a handful of fist-pumping lawmakers -- all Democrats -- who waded into the crowd.
"What do we want? Free families!" and "This is what democracy looks like" were among their cries.
The sit-in of protesting women was organized by two groups, Women's March and the Center for Popular Democracy. The protest lasted more than two hours.
In a written statement, the Capitol Police said about 575 people were charged with unlawfully demonstrating inside the office building. The police said those arrested were being released after they were processed.
Winnie Wong, political adviser for the Women's March, said the crowd's fervor will translate into "the energy we will need to see at the ballot box in November," when congressional control will be at stake.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., said she was arrested during the protest. Jayapal, who was born in India, tweeted a video of herself in which she said she was proud to be arrested to protest Trump's zero-tolerance policy.
Democratic Sens. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Edward Markey of Massachusetts also appeared before the crowd. "These folks are out here fighting for the core principles of our nation, and I applaud them for it," Merkley said in an interview.
Under Trump's zero-tolerance policy, the government has begun prosecuting all people caught entering the country without authorization. Under public pressure, Trump has halted his policy of separating children from their detained parents but around 2,000 of the families are still not reunited, with many families saying they've not known how to locate their children.
On Thursday, a federal judge in Chicago ordered the U.S. government to release a 9-year-old Brazilian boy who was separated from his mother at the U.S.-Mexico border, saying their continued separation "irreparably harms them both."
Judge Manish Shah pondered his decision for just a few hours before finding that Lidia Karine Souza can have custody of her son, Diogo, who has spent four weeks at a government-contracted shelter in Chicago. Shah ordered that the child be released Thursday, but didn't specify a time.
The mother, who has applied for asylum, was released from a detention facility in Texas on June 9 and is living with relatives outside Boston.
"Judge Shah has vindicated the rule of law and taken a definitive step to allow Lidia's son to finally be with her again. We are hopeful that this outcome will benefit other families facing similar circumstances," attorneys Jesse Bless and Britt Miller said in a written statement.
Shah, the son of immigrants from India, took just four hours before posting his written ruling after a hearing Thursday morning.
"Continued separation of ... [the] nine year-old child, and Souza," he wrote, "irreparably harms them both."
The decision came two days after a different judge ordered the government to reunite the detained children with their families within 30 days, or 14 days for those younger than age 5.
SEVERING TIES
Meanwhile, local governments around the United States are starting to sever ties with federal immigration entities as discomfort grows over the Trump administration's immigration policies, particularly the separation of children and parents.
In Texas, officials near Austin terminated a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain dozens of mothers who had been arrested and separated from their children. In California, Sacramento County ended a multimillion-dollar deal with the agency to keep migrants jailed while awaiting hearings.
The City Council of Springfield in western Oregon voted unanimously to end yet another contract with the immigration agency for housing migrants in the municipal jail. And in Alexandria, Va., authorities put an end to a deal allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to house children in a juvenile detention center.
"It just felt inherently unjust for Sacramento to make money from dealing with ICE," said Phil Serna, a Sacramento County supervisor who joined two colleagues in canceling the contract. "For me, it came down to an administration that is extremely hostile to immigrants. I didn't feel we should be part of that."
The local debates over what to do with Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities come at a time when federal immigration policies are disrupting local politics. Insurgent Democratic candidates on the left who are winning primaries -- such as Deb Haaland in New Mexico and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York -- have made defunding or abolishing the agency a central feature of their campaign platforms.
Separately, federal authorities Thursday dismantled and cleared a portion of the tent city in Portland, Ore., where protesters had been blocking the Immigration and Customs Enforcement building. Authorities arrested at least nine people who have taken part in a lengthy effort to prevent federal workers from entering their offices.
A makeshift tent city emerged during the turmoil surrounding Trump's immigration policies, and for the past 11 days it effectively shut down the agency's offices while demonstrators demanded that the agency be abolished. The camp had swelled to more than 90 tents earlier this week.
Federal officials had warned protesters that parts of the camp blocking the entrance and exit to the building were in violation of the law, having issued notices in the days before the clearing effort.
By 5:30 a.m. Thursday, officers had cleared a set of tents that had been set up across the building's driveway, an encampment that had been full of military veterans. Stu Tanquit, one of the veterans, said earlier in the week that "the only way they will get me out is to drag me out."
Robert Sperling, a Federal Protective Services spokesman, said authorities issued several warnings via a loudspeaker, urging people to leave the premises. "Some of them did," Sperling said. "Many did not."
Officers will not clear the main encampment because it is not on federal property, Sperling said, noting that his agency hopes to get Immigration and Customs Enforcement workers back at their desks by next week.
"We're going to maintain a presence there and ensure the safety and security of the facility," he said.
The raid came hours after Trump tweeted his dissatisfaction with protesters at the immigration agency's offices in cities around the country: "Leftwing Activists are trying to block ICE officers from doing their jobs and publicly posting their home addresses - putting these selfless public servants in harm's way," he wrote. "These radical protesters want ANARCHY - but the only response they will find from our government is LAW AND ORDER!"
Elsewhere, Vice President Mike Pence defended the Trump administration's zero-tolerance policy, countering a public uproar over the separated families.
Pence, speaking Thursday in an interview aboard Air Force Two while flying across Latin America, also said the U.S. was right to embrace Venezuelan refugees -- who say they want to return home after rule of law and freedoms are restored -- even as the administration takes a more aggressive stance toward Central American migrants, who he said are seeking a permanent life in the U.S.
"There is no comparison between life in Venezuela under a brutal dictatorship and life in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras," Pence said. "Venezuela has imploded into dictatorship and tyranny," he added. "This is a dictatorship that is tyrannizing its own people."
Pence met Thursday with leaders from the three Central American nations, which the administration has criticized for not doing enough to stem the flow of their people trying to enter the U.S. without authorization. The vice president said he will make clear that the U.S. will continue its zero-tolerance approach.
"Our porous borders and the loopholes in our immigration law work a great hardship on vulnerable families" by signaling that it's worth undertaking a perilous journey with human traffickers to the U.S., Pence said. "When we make it clear that we're a welcoming nation but we welcome under the law, I think that's the greatest kindness we can give to families that would otherwise be preyed upon and are preyed upon now."
[U.S. immigration: Data visualization of selected immigration statistics, U.S. border map]
Information for this article was contributed by Alan Fram, Matthew Daly, Martha Irvine, Michael Tarm, Julie Watson, Morgan Lee, Sonia Perez and Will Weissert of The Associated Press; by Leah Sottile of The Washington Post; by Simon Romero of The New York Times; and by Margaret Talev of Bloomberg News.
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A Section on 06/29/2018