WASHINGTON—Former U.S. Army Capt. Rob Cheng spent his Veteran’s Day fighting a cold wind and freezing temperatures to urge current troops—National Guards from red states and even ICE agents—to resist and reject GOP President Donald Trump’s orders to occupy the nation’s cities.
“Seeing our states full of National Guards and ICE ripping apart families has you questioning what the word ‘service’ means,” Cheng told an appreciative crowd of more than 200—most of them veterans, too—gathered in front of Washington, D.C.’s Union Station, within sight of the U.S. Capitol.
The Hyattsville, Md., resident, a member of About Faces, a group of veterans against war dedicated to opposing “militarization of our communities and to voice resistance to this regime,” led off a parade of speakers at the D.C. event, co-sponsored by May Day Strong, as were other resistance rallies.
The ”Vets Say No” rallies in D.C., Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Memphis, Tenn., Portland, Ore., and a string of smaller cities in California and Texas drew hundreds of people each.
Their theme was “no to ICE, no to occupation, no to fascism, and no to cuts stripping away life-saving services our communities need.” The rallies occurred in the cities where ICE and/or the National Guard have already invaded. The one in Portland was three blocks from a notorious ICE detention center.
“We should all be against fascism,” the emcee at the D.C. rally declared. “The #1 way to be that is through community organizing.”
About Faces, which claims 2,000 veterans as members nationwide, has another message for veterans who want to resist Trump’s orders, speakers both in D.C. and before that, elsewhere, said, “We have your back.”
Which means the group will seek and find support systems for National Guards and ICE agents who doubt the legality and morality of occupying U.S. cities and potentially fighting their residents. There’s also a website they can consult.
And all speakers urged resistance to Trump. They said his use of troops and ICE is unconstitutional, illegal, and especially immoral.
“This is a call to veterans who are here” in D.C. “and who are not here,” Cheng said. “Whose side are you on? Are you standing with people like Trump? Or are you standing with working-class people, Black and brown people, immigrants, and people who need food assistance?” due to Trump’s partial shutdown of the federal government. That shutdown cut off food stamps.
Some of the Guard members are listening, Cheng reported. “I’ve talked to a number of them,” patrolling D.C. he said. “Once they get beyond the talking points they’ve been given, they think it’s bullshit.” The “it” is their mission to patrol the cities.
The demands of About Faces and May Day Strong, the co-sponsors of the rallies in D.C. and elsewhere, include “getting all National Guard troops off our streets and repeal of the extra funding of the Department of Homeland Security” for its ICE agents to beat up, detain, dragoon, and deport people.
In D.C., they also demanded statehood, home rule free of congressional and executive interference, equal voting rights for its 710,000 residents, and an end to local police cooperation with ICE. Defying a sanctuary city ordinance the City Council enacted, pro-corporate Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) ordered the city police to cooperate with ICE. Trump wanted to supersede the police chief, but backed off.
Each Veterans Day event drew hundreds of people. One Chicago-area veteran of the Afghanistan War, Rory Fanning, writing in Truthout, renamed the holiday “Occupiers Day.”
Trump, speakers said at Veterans Day events in all those cities, is attacking Americans, strictly on the basis of the color of their skin—brown—or their political views.
That’s what happened to Cheng’s neighbors in an apartment building in Hyattsville, a close-in D.C. suburb that is heavily Black and Latino.
“Last Thursday morning, nine ICE officers wearing full battle gear raided an apartment building” across the street from his home, Cheng related. “The neighborhood gathered to resist, and we forced them to leave empty-handed.”
The Hyattsville group later learned ICE was pursuing a Filipino man, a naturalized citizen who has lived in the U.S. for more than a decade—and who has relatives in the Philippines protesting their government’s role “as a lapdog” for the U.S.
Other speakers sounded similar themes.
Michelle Chappell, the federal legislative director for Free DC and the daughter and granddaughter of veterans, said the capital city’s fight for home rule is yet another struggle against Trump.
That’s because he federalized the D.C. National Guard, while “red state” governors sent Guards to patrol D.C. streets, supposedly to protect ICE agents who raid restaurants, stores, schools, churches, and businesses. ICE seeks people who look Latino.
“We used to say, ‘We fight over there so we don’t have to fight over here,’” said Chappell. “But now we are under surveillance by the National Guard. They were literally at the doorstep of my daughter’s school…grabbing people right as they’re coming out.”
An Air Force veteran who identified himself as Randy linked the struggle against Trump’s fascist tactics at home to Trump’s imperialism abroad.
He cited Trump’s arming of Israel’s massacres of civilian Palestinians, arming Ukraine, and sending the Navy off the Venezuelan coast, threatening to overthrow its government, and what he said is the unexplained disappearance—due to ICE—of 6,000 Native American women.
Trump and his regime “overwhelm us so we forget about others,” Randy added. The solution to resisting Trump, in addition to getting National Guards and ICE agents to refuse to serve, is to form a united front, speakers said.
It would protect, said Randy, Black and brown people, LGBTQ people, trans people, Muslim-Americans, and other Trump targets.
Trump and his “War Secretary,” former Fox commentator Pete Hegseth, have used the excuse of drug-running to attack civilian fishing boats off the Venezuelan coast, killing 61 people so far.
Those deaths were a particular contrast for a white-bearded Indochina War veteran at the D.C. event. In an informal talk, he said he served in the Navy during that war—and it intercepted fishing boats in the high seas off Vietnam.
But after inspecting them and quizzing the crews, “we let them go,” he said. Nobody died.
University of Massachusetts at Amherst legal scholar Jamie Rowen, who focuses on veterans’ issues, told Adam Klarsfeld of All Rise News that Trump’s policy reminds many Vietnam veterans she speaks to about the “moral injury” they suffered in combat.
“They’re worried that what you’re going to see in these younger active duty military men engaging in these types of enforcement is a similar moral injury, where they’re going to feel that they were participating in something that was wrong and immoral, and that’s going to affect their sense of self moving forward,” Rowen said.
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