US Friends walk for migrants
‘It feels really daunting to be up against such critical and large and in some ways existential threats'
A group of US Friends embarked on a 300-mile march this month to demonstrate against the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants.
The march from New York City to Washington DC aims to show solidarity with migrants and other groups that the Friends say are being targeted by Donald Trump’s administration. Walking south from Flushing Meeting House, the thirty or so Friends are crossing New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Pennsylvania to deliver a copy of the seventeenth-century ‘Flushing Remonstrance’ to the US Capitol in Washington DC. The historical document called for religious freedom and opposed a ban on Quaker worship.
‘It feels really daunting to be up against such critical and large and in some ways existential threats,’ Jess Hobbs Pifer, a twenty-five-year-old Quaker and march organiser told the Associated Press as the march began in early May. ‘I just have to put one foot in front of the other to move towards something better, something more true to what Quakers before us saw for this country and what people saw for the American Experiment, the American dream.’
Max Goodman, a twenty-eight-year-old Quaker, said the Flushing Remonstrance document was still relevant today. ‘We really saw a common thread between the ways that the administration is sort of flying against the norms and ideals of constitutional law and equality before the law,’ he said. ‘Even when they aren’t breaking rules explicitly, they’re really engaging in bad faith with the spirit of pluralism, tolerance and respect for human dignity that undergirds our founding documents as Americans and also shows up in this document that’s really important in New York Quaker history.’
Princeton Meeting House offered respite to the walkers after they had completed an early portion of the walk.
