Progressive groups announce #ClosetheCamps protest against migrant detention funding

Advocacy groups MoveOn, United We Dream, the American Friends Service Committee and Families Belong Together announced Friday that on July 2 they will protest outside of congressional district offices and call on members of Congress to refuse to authorize any funding for “family detention and deportation.”

Their protest comes after the House voted to pass a bipartisan $4.6 billion Senate package to address the southern border conditions despite a push from progressives for more protections for migrant children.

{mosads}”Right now, tens of thousands of migrants are being held in horrific conditions, forcibly separated from their families, with no promise of reunification or future assistance,” the groups said in a statement. 

“From imprisoning children in inhumane detention centers, threatening widespread raids to break up families, and covering up reports of migrants dying in U.S. custody, we must come together to permanently end family detention and separation, ensure all families are reunited, and close the camps,” they added. 

According to the #ClosetheCamps website, there were protests planned in 37 locations as of Friday afternoon. 

MoveOn said Friday that Twitter had blocked a link to the website the groups are using to plan the protest. 

The group tweeted a photo of a Twitter screen telling users that its link may be unsafe and asking if they want to continue instead of just taking them to the linked page. The issue, however, appeared to be resolved late Friday afternoon. 

#BREAKING: Supporters of @realDonaldTrump‘s detention camps are maliciously flagging our 7/2 protest website as spam to interfere with our efforts to #CloseTheCamps. @Twitter please respond to our formal request to be unblocked. https://t.co/A0obXzwiMO pic.twitter.com/Qv1Mff1k4L

— MoveOn (@MoveOn) June 28, 2019

“When users clicked on the link to our web hub site for Tuesday’s Close the Camps protests from a tweet, Twitter displayed a notice indicating that our web hub site appeared ‘unsafe'” MoveOn’s Chief Technology Officer Ann Lewis told The Hill in a statement. “We believe the web hub site link was flagged because Twitter users with malicious intent (whether trolls, bots, or otherwise) used the “report tweet” function within Twitter, even though our tweet was legitimate and linked to a legitimate site.”

The Hill has reached out to Twitter for comment on the matter. 

The conditions in which migrant children are being held have come under scrutiny in recent days after lawyers told The Associated Press that at a facility in Clint, Texas, children went without bathing for weeks on end and were fed only meals that included uncooked frozen food or rice.