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The Women’s March showed its power on a day Donald Trump’s presidency stood still

The Women’s March showed its power on a day Donald Trump’s presidency stood still

People are packing up their cars, loading up subway stations, and hopping on busses to head to Women’s March events in towns and cities across the country. Since last year, feminists and their allies have come together under the Women’s March banner to protest both issues like the gender pay gap and Trump administration initiatives, like the president’s immigration ban. But it’s particularly poignant that the second Women’s March meets on what happens to be the one-year anniversary of Trump taking office and the first day of a government shutdown.

By midnight Saturday, Congress was locked in a standoff after failing to reach a deal on immigration. Earlier in the week, on Thursday, House Republicans passed a bill “to fund the government for four weeks and extend the Children’s Health Insurance Program for six years, after Congress had failed to reauthorize that program for the last four months,” Vox’s Tara Golshan and Dylan Scott reported. However, 45 Senate Democrats and five Republicans rejected the measure because of the White House’s “unwillingness to accept a bipartisan proposal to address the nearly 700,000 immigrants in legal limbo after he pledged to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program,” Golshan and Scott wrote.

As Vox senior reporter Anna North found while on the ground at New York City’s Women’s March on Saturday morning, the topic was front of mind for marchers.

This should come as no surprise for the millions of people who came together last year in the nascent days of Trump’s administration to rally against what was largely viewed of a rejection of women’s power in Hillary Clinton’s presidential loss and an embrace of an alleged sexual predator as the nation’s leader. For many who have protested in the last year under the Women’s March banner, gender equality has been not a solitary focus but a lens through which they view the fight for many issues, like racial justice, health care, immigration, police reform, and economic inequality.

And sure, this shutdown won’t last forever. Eventually one side will have to give in. The question is: Will that come at the expense of immigrants and their allies — many of whom, both immigrants and allies, are marching this weekend?

To Read More visit Michelle Garcia’s original post here.

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