WASHINGTON—There’s going to be another big D.C. demonstration, this one against President Donald Trump and his troops now occupying the nation’s capital.
If a 3-hour-long prep session for hundreds of activists on the evening of Sept. 4 is any indication, the march on Saturday, Sept. 6, scheduled to run from 11 am to 4 pm, promises to be peaceful with a huge crowd. The theme of the meeting was “Refuse, Resist, Rebuild,” and it focused not only on planning Saturday’s march but also on ways to sustain and grow a variety of related campaigns.
This march is scheduled to draw crowds not just from Washington and its suburbs, but also busloads of people from around the U.S. The event is branded “We Are All D.C.” and has a simple objective: “Demand that federal forces leave now.”
Those federal forces are 2,300 National Guard members from red states whose governors sent them to town to help protect violent Trump ICE agents who are marauding D.C. neighborhoods and restaurants seeking to detain and deport immigrants.
“We are three and a half weeks into a serious occupation. It is violent and it is brutal,” said Keya Chatterjee, executive director of FreeDC, a lead sponsor of the planning session and march.
“People have been chasing away ICE and moving people away from its checkpoints,” Chatterjee added. “And at the end of this”—when the occupation is over—“we’re not going to go back to where we started,” where D.C. and its 710,000 people are always subject to congressional whims and meddling.
“We’re going to get statehood, and we’re going to get equal rights for D.C.,” Chatterjee vowed.
The marchers on Sept. 6, including the co-chairs and members of the D.C. chapter of the Communist Party USA, have at least one progressive local official in their corner. D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb (D) marched into federal court on Sept. 4, seeking a judicial order to throw Trump’s troops out of town.
They also have a ton of union support. March sponsors included the Service Employees and its Locals 500 and 32BJ, Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689, Jobs With Justice, the Maryland-D.C. AFL-CIO, the Metro Washington Central Labor Council, the National Education Association, National Nurses United, Unite HERE and its two D.C.-area locals, the Washington Teachers Union/AFT, and the Workers Circle. 
That’s in direct contrast to D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D), who has sought to placate Trump and even praises his troops’ presence in fighting crime, which was already declining. Mention of her name drew jeers from the prep session crowd.
Trump recently called the capital a “hellhole” and explicitly said his deployment there is a model for sending troops to, in order, Chicago, Baltimore, New Orleans, and possibly Oakland and San Francisco. All are heavily Democratic cities run by mayors who are Black or Asian.
“Deploying the National Guard to engage in law enforcement is not only unnecessary and unwanted, but it is also dangerous and harmful to the District and its residents,” City Attorney General Schwalb retorted.
“No American city should have the U.S. military, particularly out-of-state military not accountable to the residents and untrained in local law enforcement, policing its streets. It’s D.C. today, but could be any other city tomorrow. We’ve filed this action to put an end to this illegal federal overreach.”
“These deployments amount to an involuntary military occupation that far exceeds the president’s authority over the National Guard,” Schwalb said. He said the troops were “deputized by the U.S. Marshals Service to conduct law enforcement activities…in violation of the prohibition on military involvement in local law enforcement.”
Meanwhile, back at the planning session, hundreds of participants at a “town hall” heard a panel of activists discuss causes that are likely to come up during the march, and past activism against Trump.
“We refuse the takeover of our communities by force. We resist policies that leave our neighborhoods in fear,” said the Rev. Christopher Zacarias.
Kate Sugarman, head of Doctors for Camp Closure—referring to the inhumane ICE prison camps—extended the protest to the private air carrier, Avelo Airlines, which has taken Trump contracts to transport detainees.
Avelo has already been thrown out of airports on the West Coast and in Las Vegas, all areas with heavy Latino populations, Sugarman said. And Gov. Wes Moore, D-Md., is already noticing anti-ICE and anti-Avelo protests at Thurgood Marshall Baltimore-Washington International Airport.
Pressure is mounting in New Haven, Conn., Avelo’s headquarters, to toss the airline out of that airport, too, Sugarman told People’s World.
Sept. 4 participants also discussed other ways to resist Trump. One was informing and educating day laborers—most of them Latino—on their rights when confronted by troops, including their rights to be silent and to have an attorney.
Another was lobbying lawmakers. “We spent all day today talking to Congress” about the situation “and about how they shouldn’t be overriding our local laws,” said Chatterjee of FreeDC.
A third sees constant doubling of numbers of demonstrators outside the Tesla dealership in suburban Rockville, Md. Multibillionaire Elon Musk, Trump’s one-time DOGE director who led the assault against federal workers, owns Tesla.
“I hope this sends a message to other billionaires that if they mess with our politics, we’ll mess with their businesses,” said Tesla protest organizer Robert Wald.
The “We Are All D.C.” march will commence at Malcolm X (Meridian Hill) Park, 2301 16th St NW, on Saturday, Sept. 4, at 11 am. Click here for more details.
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