Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia has a message to the world: The Muslim ban must not stand.
“Long Beach has an amazing Cambodian community because we welcomed them as refugees from a country torn apart by genocide,” Garcia wrote on his Facebook page Saturday. “That’s what America is all about. We stand up for others with compassion. This refugee and Muslim ban does not reflect the values of our country.”
The mayor and educator quoted the famous inscription at the base of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
The Californian city is home to the largest Cambodian community in the country.
On Friday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order barring entry to the United States for immigrants, refugees and visa holders from seven Muslim-majority countries, including traveling U.S. permanent residents. Though the American Civil Liberties Union successfully had a New York judge temporarily stop the deportation of visa holders on Saturday, Trump’s order stands, with massive protests springing up around airports across the country.
“President Trump’s order [Saturday] was not only a moral crisis and a risk to our national security because he’s fueling anti-American forces around the world in their view that the United States is anti-Muslim, but it is a constitutional crisis that President Trump has set off,” Cecillia Wang, ACLU deputy legal director, told MSNBC.
“By filing lawsuits, as well as by Americans around the country going to airports around the country in solidarity and to show that we believe in the rule of law, I believe that we’re going to prevail and we’re going to get these people into the country who have a right to be here, as refugees and as people who hold valid visas that have been issued by our government,” Wang said.
