The week began with the largest protest in American history; the Women’s March occurred in nearly every major American city — not to mention internationally — with an attendance of approximately 2.9 million people marching.
This would not be the last protest to occur last week.
There has been one nearly every day, each following another executive action signed by Donald Trump. As many conservatives argue, he’s simply doing what he promised he would do once in office. While this may be true, more than 73.6 million Americans voted against Trump and his policies, and now those people are making their voices heard.
Just a day after his swearing-in, Trump stood in front of a wall honoring fallen CIA agents, and boasted — falsely — about how large his inauguration crowd was. He stood in front of two stars placed there for two fallen Navy SEALS — Glenn Doherty and Tyronne Woods — who died in the Benghazi attacks, attacks he used as propaganda during his campaign.
Wednesday morning, an underground pipeline in Iowa leaked roughly 138,000 gallons of diesel into the environment around it, irreparably damaging that land; it’s the biggest leak in 10 years. This came only a day after Trump signed executive orders to advance work on the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. Even worse, even after numerous environmental disasters involving pipelines, Trump’s Tuesday freeze on all of the Environmental Protection Agency’s funding, grants and research ensures no environmental protection agents will be brought in to oversee the project. It is important to note: This was followed by a media blackout of both the EPA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. His reasoning for advancing Keystone XL is that it will create roughly 28,000 jobs; the State Department refutes this claim, saying at most it will create 3,900 jobs for only a year during the pipeline’s construction. TransCanada, the company who owns the pipeline, does not dispute these numbers.
On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order regarding “The Wall” between the Mexican-American border. This will be a grossly expensive — roughly $25 billion — project, a project Americans will be paying for through both taxes and a proposed 20 percent tariff on Mexican goods. Additionally he ordered all federal grant funding be revoked from sanctuary cities, which includes New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Washington, San Francisco and Seattle.
Arguably the worst moment of the week came Friday, when Trump banned all incoming refugees and immigrants from seven primarily Muslim countries: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya. What was horrifying about this order was the unconstitutional and illegal provision in the order that included visa and green card holders in the ban. These are people who have come legally to this country, some of whom have been living here for years.
This ban affects A&M directly — more than 200 of your fellow Aggies may have their student visas and green cards revoked; they certainly can’t go home to visit any of their families until the ban is lifted. Imagine being trapped in a foreign country that seems to have turned against you. These are individuals who came here to Texas A&M in search a better life and a good education. Is it okay to turn our backs on them? No. We, as Aggies and Americans, are better than this.
Grace Neumann is an English junior and page designer for The Battalion.