Protesters in Charlotte decry Trump’s immigration policies

Kimia Adibi held a poster in Charlotte’s Marshall Park on Saturday with a plea to President Donald Trump.

“Don’t Ban My Grandma,” the 14-year-old Randolph Middle School student’s placard read.

Kimia fears that if her grandmother returns to Tehran, Iran, after visiting her family in Charlotte, that the U.S. government might never allow her to return given Trump’s recent travel ban on seven Muslim countries.

That’s why Kimia and friend Lucy Hepp, 13, joined nearly 60 people at the park protesting Trump’s policies. “Are We Great Yet?” Lucy’s poster read, playing off Trump’s campaign slogan of “Make America Great Again.”

“It’s un-American to do this,” Kimia, a Muslim, said of Trump’s immigration policies. She said her mother travels as a manager at a Charlotte company and that her mother’s boss is afraid of letting her travel right now.

Similar anti-Trump rallies were held in cities across America and the world on Saturday, including one in Raleigh attended by hundreds of people.

In an interview with the (Raleigh) News & Observer, North Carolina Republican Party executive director Dallas Woodhouse dismissed Saturday’s protesters as “the constant protesting class.”

“There is a lot of vitriol that seems to me people complaining because the election didn’t come out their way,” Woodhouse said. “Everything cannot be an existential crisis to the United States that President Trump is doing. Because if everything is the worst thing in the world, then nothing is.”

But many at the Charlotte rally expressed fears similar to Kimia’s, for their religions and freedoms and the country’s future.

“Trump is going against the values of America, he is going against what is legal, just and right,” said rally organizer Jibril Hough, a spokesman for the Islamic Center of Charlotte. “It’s not just about a Muslim travel ban. It’s a Muslim ban. It’s about an Islamophobia that will not stop with seven Muslim countries and a Muslim travel ban. These people have been working for years to do this, It didn’t just start with his campaign.”

“First they Came For the Muslims,” Hough’s poster read.

Zyg Furmaniuk and his wife, Judy Morrison, came from their home in Dilworth.

“If you substitute the word ‘Muslim’ with the word ‘Jew,’ this sounds an awful lot like the beginnings of huge scare tactics meant to inflame our passions and lose everything we believe in as Americans,” Furmaniuk said.

“The troubling thing is that this happened at all,” he said of the travel ban, which a judge in Seattle temporarily blocked on Friday and which the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has lifted as a result. “It just means this administration is starting down a path that every one of us needs to be vigilant about and protest every step of the way.”

Osama Syed, president of the Muslim Student Association at Davidson College, joined several other students from the school at the rally.

Gun violence is a far bigger threat to America that Trump should address, he said. Rallies like Saturday’s, he said, show policy makers “what the people think, because this is a democracy.”

Several other Davidson College students held huge banners that said, “Davidson College Stands With Muslims” and “Refugees are Welcome Here.”

“When it comes to the series of discriminatory policies that he promised in his campaign and that he is going to try and enact, we need to be very clear that the American people are not going to stand for it,” said Davidson College freshman Sarah Mellin, 20. She has close friends who are refugees and recent immigrants.

Among other speakers at the rally were Charlotte City Council members Dimple Ajmera and Mayor pro tem Vi Lyles. Rose Hamid, a Muslim from Charlotte also addressed the crowd, thanking them “for showing the world what America really is.”

This story was originally published February 4, 2017 at 7:23 PM with the headline "Protesters in Charlotte decry Trump’s immigration policies."