Friday’s Lights for Liberty vigil in Peterborough culminated in a visit from Democratic presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke.
Over 700 cities nationwide participated in Lights for Liberty, which aimed to shed light on inhumane conditions for migrants now housed in camps along the Mexican border. In Peterborough, hundreds gathered in front of the town house for a series of speeches, chants and songs before marching around the Granite Block and then down to Putnam Park, where O’Rourke swooped in to address the crowd. The former Texas state representative spoke of his visit to the border camps and the deplorable conditions he saw there.
“Thank you all for what you’re doing right now,” O’Rourke told the crowd, “especially for those people and those children who have no voice, who fear that they’re not being heard, who are strangers in a strange land, a place where they do not speak the language, in many cases, imprisoned though they’ve committed no crime, and having no idea when or even if they will see their parents or their family again. And that is happening right now in this country.”
O’Rourke, making his fourth trip to New Hampshire since announcing his bid for the presidency, spoke to the crowd for about 15 minutes – sometimes in Spanish – and then greeted a long line of admirers, before heading across the street to Post and Beam Brewing.
A recent poll showed O’Rourke with 2 percent support for the Democratic nomination, behind Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg.
“I ask you, please keep up this fight,” O’Rourke told the crowd in Putnam Park. “Please continue to gather, please continue to speak out and speak up and reach out to people who are in positions of public trust to make sure they reflect the urgency that we all feel on this issue. It is only then that this country will ive up to its full potential.”
Earlier in the evening, speakers addressed the crowd at the Town House, some of whom had their own ideas about what it means to run for president.
“Ever since I was in fifth grade, I’ve only had one answer to the question ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ President of the United States,” said recent ConVal graduate Anna McGuiness. “Now, in the face of the horrors we are protesting today, I wonder at the implications of the loaded answer I’ve always given…Now I question, what would it mean to be president? Does it mean abandoning people in need? Throwing fellow human beings away in camps and prisons? What kind of path was a person who would make those kind of choices on? What would being a leader cost? When I see ICE officials on the news, Donald Trump behind his podium, members of Congress supporting this legislation, I do not see leaders – I see cowards. I see people who have been allowed to operate behind closed doors for too long. I see people afraid to admit that they are wrong now because it means admitting that they have been wrong all along. The children of today deserve better than to turn on the TV and see this staring back at them. The people in these camps deserve better than to be treated like this by their neighbors, their friends and their family. We all deserve better, we all should have done better and we all can do better.”
Along with McGuiness, speakers included New Hampshire Alliance for Immigrants and Refugees director Eva Castillo, Mohammed Saleh of the Keene Immigrant & Refugee Partnership, ConVal student Gabby Oja, New Hampshire Citizens Alliance chairman Alejandro Urrutia, and Marjorie Margolis of Sharon, who took a trip to the border camps this year and is planning another for November. Margolis was one of many in attendance who likened the border camps to the concentration camps of the Holocaust, recalling Nazi propaganda techniques: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it,” she said.
That same day, Vice President Mike Pence toured the border camps in Texas and told reporters “Every family that I spoke to told me that they are being well cared for.” President Donald Trump dismissed the ensuing articles and videos from the CNN and New York Times reporters – who were on the same trip and described miserable conditions – as “phony.”