The UConn Youth for Socialist Action and the Connecticut Students for a Dream rallied at Fairfield Way to show their support for the Migrant Caravan and immigrants everywhere.
Students came out by the dozens amidst the winter wind enveloping Fairfield Way in the center of UConn’s campus on Thursday, Nov. 29, in an effort to raise awareness about the thousands of Central American migrants welcomed with tear gas and rubber bullets upon their arrival to America’s southern border in Tijuana, one that Trump warned of before the midterms.
“Our entire view is: why can money move across borders freely, but people can’t?”, Paul Brausman, founder of the Quinnipiac Youth Socialists for Action, and active UConn YSA member, said. “Under our system, money is literally more of a person than people are.”
The event, “A Rally for the Caravan”, was Co-Hosted by the UConn Youth for Socialist Action and Connecticut Students for a Dream for both the Migrant Caravan and immigrants everywhere.
“I am undocumented,” seventh-semester Latin American studies and human rights major Joseline Tlacomulco said, “ I am from Mexico, and so the fact that my country is also perpetuating this as well is also unfair and very disgusting.”
Wyatt Mund, President of the UConn YSA and fifth-semester digital media and design major, reiterated that the event’s goal was to stand in solidarity with the migrant caravan and all immigrants by taking a stand against the US border system.
“We think that the working class is international…it is in our shared interest to see things like the border and this whole deportation apparatus dismantled,” Mund said.
Many attendees stressed the responsibility of the United States to aid citizens of countries in which they have previously economically intervened, as many are left in a worse state.
It’s a very nationalistic and xenophobic stance to reject people,” Paul Brausman said, “A lot of the Central American countries these people are coming from, the United States got involved with, in terms of cous and economic strongmining. They come to the people who did this to them, and we turn them away.”
Seventh-semester history and human rights double major and Latin American studies minor Stephanie Keithan said she was in attendance to represent the central american population, as she herself is Salvadorian.
“I don’t consider the caravan ‘migrants,’ migrants themselves,” Keithan said, “I consider them to be refugees because they are fleeing incessant violence, they are fleeing years and years of U.S. intervention in our countries. These people right now are in desperate need of aid.”
Grace Burns is a campus correspondent for The Daily Campus. She can be reached via email at grace.burns@uconn.edu .