Thousands to line Ogden Avenue Sunday to protest Trump administration

Westmont’s Kara Kuo is just one of about 15,000 individuals who have agreed to stand along a 30-mile route from Aurora to Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood Sunday as part of the Hands Across Chicagoland protest.

Protestors plan to form a human chain against what they are calling Trump’s illegal and authoritarian actions and the GOP’s failure to defend the Constitution.

The event takes place from from noon to 2 p.m. and will cut through several communities in DuPage and Cook counties including Naperville, Lisle, Downers Grove, Westmont, Hinsdale, Western Springs and La Grange.

Kuo said she is participating in the event because she has both environmental and constitutional concerns.

“When you see or know of something that is not right, as a citizen I think you should speak up,” Kuo said.

“If we lose the rule of law, we might as well forget everything else,” she added.

Previously, Kuo joined in the protests against medical equipment sterilizer, Sterigenics, whose parent company, Sotera Health, agreed to pay more than $400 million to 882 based on claims of high concentrations of ethylene oxide at its former Willowbrook facility.

With President Donald Trump in office, Kuo worries about the future of the Environmental Protection Agency and the environment.

“No one is moving to Mars any time soon,” she said. “We have one earth. We all are not going to live forever, but we do want to live in the healthiest way we can and not with cancers caused by environmental factors.”

“The air we are breathing, the water we are drinking, the food we are eating, it all is impacted,” Kuo said. “The environment is the foundation of everything.”

The protestors will be joined by numerous local officials including U.S. Rep.Bill Foster and dozens of other organizations including the Democratic Party of DuPage County, Indivisible Illinois and the Illinois Federation of Teachers.

Reid McCollum, chairman of the Democratic Party of DuPage County, said he is anticipating about 15,000 people at the event.

“We are not trying to literally hold hands, but we will have enough people to have a huge impact,” McCollum said. As of Wednesday, more than 12,000 people are registered for the event.

Individuals who sign up based on their zip code at handsacrosschi.com are given a 10- to 15-foot span of the 30-mile route that begins on Ogden Avenue in Aurora and stretches to Cicero where it heads along 26th Street to Chicago.

Participants are encouraged to hold homemade signs and wear black.

McCollum said the inspiration for this event began when 2,500 people attended a protest in front of the Lisle Tesla dealership in early April.

At first, the organizers contemplated a protest that would run from the Lisle Telsa dealership to the Westmont Tesla dealership—a 7-mile path.

However, they rethought that plan because “with the Trump administration sending people to foreign prisons without due process, threatening to suspend habeas corpus, ignoring court rulings and making a mockery of the Constitution, we felt we needed to do something that focused on violations of the Constitution and peoples’ rights, instead of just what Elon Musk is involved in,” McCollum said.

The route does includes a couple of gaps due to safety concerns where there is no sidewalk.

Mike Waters, a volunteer with the West Suburban Chicago chapter of Indivisible, a progressive advocacy group and a Hands Across Chicagoland sponsor, said he is participating in the event due to his concern for “what is happening in Washington.”

“The steady march toward authoritarianism is probably the single biggest concern. The current administration is trampling on the Constitution, our rights, federal law. So many of their actions are a blatant violation of the Constitution and federal law and they don’t care,” said Waters, who will be standing on Odgen Avenue near his home in La Grange.

“It is a dangerous precedent that we should all be worried about,” he said.

“The way Trump is using the office as a weapon to go after institutions and people he doesn’t like, not because they have done anything illegal, but simply because they supported causes or espouse views that he doesn’t support. That is just wrong,” Waters said.

He said Trump’s use of the office to enrich himself and his family, the disregard for science, reductions in medical research and funding and potential reductions in Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid are concerning.

Westmont’s Loretta Reasor will be standing on Ogden Avenue at the protest with her husband something she did not think she’d begin to do at the age of 65.

Her husband has attended protests at the area’s Telsa dealerships.

“I decided to join him when Trump threatened to pull the license for CBS,” Reasor said. “It was the last straw for me.