Protests on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border will be greeting Donald Trump in California today, where he’ll be visiting his eight baby-wall prototypes built at U.S. taxpayer expense. San Diego is the largest city on the border to formally oppose the stupid thing, passing a resolution last year “calling it detrimental to the city’s environment and tourism”:
In San Diego on Monday, immigrant activists, church leaders and elected officials held a press conference at the city’s historic Chicano Park to call for demonstrations to show border communities do not support a wall. Standing in front of murals of Mexican revolutionaries, they chanted “We reject your hate! We don’t need your racist wall!”
“It’s really important that as a region, as a city that has firsthand understanding of what the border wall means for our communities that we stand against (this) and we send a strong message to DC to say this is something that we don’t welcome,” City Councilwoman Georgette Gomez said Monday.
It’s not just border communities either, with new CBS polling released this week showing 60 percent of Americans overall oppose the stupid wall that Mexico will never pay for. In fact, as of February 3, it was U.S. taxpayers who shelled out more than $700,000 in overtime pay to protect the prototypes:
San Diego Sheriff’s Department deputies, fearing large-scale protests over the construction of President Donald Trump’s border wall prototypes last fall, logged more than 10,000 hours of overtime in a three-month period before and after project construction.
But “no protests occurred during the month-long construction of the eight prototype walls. Local activists said that they ignored the project so as not to draw attention to it.” Nothing like spending someone else’s money like it’s going out of style.