‘We want police to stay away’ - thousands descend on Chicago ahead of DNC

The organisers of the massive anti-war protests expect 30,000 to 40,000 people to gather in Chicago, where the Democratic National Convention (DNC) starts on Monday.

“People are coming from the Chicago area, from as far as New Mexico, and we have busses coming from Indiana,” says Faayani Aboma Mijana, a spokesperson and lead organiser of the Coalition to March on the DNC.

More than 200 organisations, including labour unions, have joined the Coalition to March, seeking an immediate end to Israel's brutal war on Gaza, where the Israeli military has killed more than 40,000 people.

The protesters want the US to suspend military aid to Israel, and the organisers have been vocal critics of President Joe Biden’s continuing support for Tel Aviv.

Mijana says the protest movement is not hopeful about any policy shift in the stance of the Democratic Party on Israel’s “genocidal war”.

“We've seen the degree to which the Democratic Party has gone to purge members who are even slightly soft on Palestine from its own ranks,” Mijana tells TRT World.

“So our view is we're gonna build a mass movement that pushes these demands around Palestine and stop the genocide as well as a lot of secondary demands, such as stopping police crimes, legalisation for all immigrants, undocumented immigrants, so on and so forth.”

Concerns of confrontation

Authorities have deployed the National Guard in the Chicago city ahead of the protest in expectation of skirmishes between the protesters and the police.

Several commentators have drawn comparisons between this week’s expected events with the confrontation between anti-Vietnam war demonstrators and the police.

However, the organisers of the March on DNC say their planned protests are peaceful and include the presence of families and children. Blame for any aggravation, if it occurs, lies with the authorities and police, which have set up roadblocks around the DNC venue.

“We've gone to great lengths to ensure that we can have a peaceful protest,” says Mijana.

“We've gone to great lengths to ensure that we can have a family-friendly protest where people, regardless of age, ability status, immigration status, can march with us, and the ways that we've done that is we fought for permits for our march route.”

Chicago authorities refused the demonstrators to hold a gathering near the United Center on the city’s West Side, where the main convention event takes place.

The protesters also say they have been given permits to march along narrow streets only and haven’t been allowed to use the main road.

With thousands of people crowding into narrow spaces and police on the edge, there are concerns of confrontation.

Mijana says the protest organisers have asked observers from the National Lawyers Guild to keep a check on the police conduct and document any human rights violations.

“The only role that we see for police is to not infringe on our First Amendment right to protest. We want them as far away as possible from our protest because we know how to keep our protest safe.”

While democrats meet at the DNC and protesters call for stopping the massacre of Palestinians, several Jewish groups have also organised meetings in the city. Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ husband, Dough Emhoff, will speak at one such pro-Israel gathering.