San Marcos-area activists and students met June 27 to protest immigration enforcement policies and migrant-family separations along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Mano Amiga, a local activist group, spearheaded the Wednesday rally at the Hays County Courthouse in San Marcos as a precursor to a larger rally in Brownsville June 28, hosted by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Wednesday’s rally consisted of Mano Amiga members, local leaders and community members, speaking on the recent family separations, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and their disapproval of the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
Karen Muñoz, co-founder of Mano Amiga, said she wants to remind people that the family separations are happening to people in the San Marcos community already by way of ICE detentions.
“Since the organization was started last February, we’ve had five people we’ve helped get out of deportation proceedings so this is happening to people here already,” Muñoz said. “People are getting stopped for things like missing stop signs and then not having a valid ID so that’s still a separation of family.”
Erin Zwiener, Texas House District 45 candidate, said at the rally that she was utterly horrified by the moral line the U.S. has crossed regarding the federal government sanction for migrant-family separations.
“The current government is not going to solve this,” Zwiener said. “I want to encourage every single person to fight for a better government.”
The University Star will be providing updates on migrant-family separations in the Rio Grande Valley, including coverage of the ACLU’s rally in Brownsville.