In his first week as president Donald Trump has imposed a large number of attacks, from the unbearably cruel (restricting abortion access, closing the borders to migrantsand refugees from seven nations) to the destructive (restarting the Keystone and DAPL pilelines) to the absurdlypetty (deleting the White House's Spanish language home page) . On The Project, Wayleed Aly gave as of January 27, and with the exception of the corporate power grab that was the Trans Pacific Partnership, it is all extremely disturbing.
Below is a very partial list of brief accounts of some of the developments — with a heavy focus on the protests and opposition to Trump's moves.
Thousands protest in New York for Muslim and immigrant rights
Thousands of protesters packed into Washington Square Park in New York on January 25 for an emergency rally in support of Muslim and immigrant rights, .
The New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations organised the event after leaked documents showed Trump was preparing to sign an executive order blocking visas from being issued to anyone from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.
Emergency protests take to streets over Trump's pipeline revivals
Donald Trump’s move to revive the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines last night in Washington, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia and other cities.
Filmmaker Josh Fox, who helped organise the New York protest, said: "Donald Trump was going to be pushing the Dakota Access pipeline through this presidential memorandum at 11:00 in the morning. By 12:00, there was a Facebook event up. By, I think, 2:00 in the afternoon, there were 2,000 people that said they were going to come. We had, we think, between 2,000 and 5,000 people last night in New York City in the freezing rain ...
"It was a very, very powerful moment. And it shows solidarity, and I think it shows just how much people really care about this issue, about Standing Rock, about indigenous sovereignty, about clean water."
Thousands swarm Senate officers to reject Trump’s cabinet picks
Just days after millions took to the streets worldwide for the Women’s March, a coalition group has already set the stage for continued resistance, on January 25, with weekly protests around the country called “Resist Trump Tuesdays.”
On January 24, more than 10,000 people showed up to senators’ district offices nationwide to demand that the US Senate reject Trump’s “swamp cabinet of billionaires, racists and climate change deniers”, as the organisers put in a statement.
Two hundred actions were staged around the country, and targeted both Republicans and Democrats.
US government agencies ‘go rogue’ to defy Trump
Employees from more than a dozen US government agencies have in defiance of bids by Trump to muzzle federal climate change research and other science, TeleSUR English said on January 26.
Scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA and other bureaus have privately launched Twitter accounts —borrowing names and logos of their agencies — to protest restrictions enforced by the new administration.
“Can't wait for President Trump to call us FAKE NEWS,” one anonymous National Park Service employee posted on the newly opened Twitter account @AltNatParkService.
The restrictions have reinforced concerns that Trump, a climate change sceptic, is out to squelch federally backed research showing that emissions from fossil fuel combustion and other human activities are contributing to global warming.
Moer than 100 Asian-American and Pacific Islander groups pledge to resist Trump
More than 100 Asian American and Pacific Islander groups of “collective resistance” to the Trump administration, declaring the US president “a direct threat to millions of people’s safety and to the health of the planet”.
The statement expresses solidarity with “Southeast Asian refugees organising to end; Muslims, Arabs, Sikhs and South Asians fighting surveillance, profiling, war and; women reclaiming their bodies against trafficking, domestic violence, exploitation and criminalisation; low-wage workers standing up against wage theft, poor working conditions and abusive employers;and Pacific Islanders building a generation to fight against generational poverty caused by loss of sovereignty, militarisation of lands and people, forced displacement, and criminalisation; and trans, gender-non-conforming, and queer people putting their bodies on the line to demand a different, more humane world.”
Mexical language groups slams deletion of Spanish-language White House homepage
The Mexican Academy of Language has to delete the Spanish version of the White House homepage, calling it "discrimination."
“After we realized that the Spanish version of (the website for) the Presidency of the United States of America was deleted, the Mexican Academy of Language expresses its concern for what can only be considered an aggression against the first cultural minority of that country and against a language with presence all over the world,” the academy said in an official statement.
After Mexico, the United States currently has the world's second-largest Spanish-speaking population, making the disappearance of the website even more shocking. The group said: "Silencing Spanish in the official communications of the nation represents a discriminatory act against the millions of Spanish speakers and in particular against the millions of Mexicans living on the other side of our border."