‘Public health demands — close the camps!’

APHA Annual Meeting attendees and other public health advocates took to the streets of Philadelphia on Tuesday morning to call for an end to family separations, anti-immigrant rhetoric and deportation.

Protestors marched from the Pennsylvania Convention Center to a local U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement office. Outside of the ICE office, the crowd chanted "Public health demands — close the camps!" Once there, advocacy and humanitarian groups spoke out and drove home their message.

"Working here in Philadelphia, I have seen way too many families that have been separated by ICE detentions," Daphne Owen, assistant medical director at Puentes de Salud told the APHA Annual Meeting Blog. "I just got back from the border where I saw the absolute humanitarian crisis that's happening as a result of (current immigration policies) and I just can't not be here."

At today's meeting of the APHA Governing Council, the Association adopted a late-breaking policy statement opposing family separation at the border.

Photos by Aaron Warnick, courtesy The Nation's Health