I attended the 29 January 2017 emergency protest at Detroit Metro Airport (DTW) against Trump’s Muslim ban.
According to the Detroit Free Press, thousands were in attendance — which certainly matches what I saw. The event lasted around three hours, a bit over the original schedule, and was spread across five large areas of McNamara Terminal.
A vast majority of those in attendance were very peaceful, and there was only one small group of people who were “outside” the protest and promoting more extreme measures. However, eventually even that group followed the plan and did not cause many problems.
The organizers did a great job engaging and managing the large crowd, and I never felt unsafe or like things were about to get violent or out of hand. They had speakers in a few places, and many people around with vests (identifying themselves are event organizers) and blowhorns.
Additionally, the police I saw were very polite and were having positive interactions with the crowd. They were supportive of the group’s right to express ourselves, and as accomodating as could reasonably be expected.
If you were hoping the protest was going to get violent and overthrow the airport, you would have been very disappointed. Fortunately, that is not what this largely family based crowd was looking for — and was certainly not something I wanted. Instead, it was an empowering experience with thousands of people treating each other nice, and coming together to tell the world that we do not stand with our President’s hatred towards others.
We have a lot more work to do — but in these early days, this was a great way to bring like-minded people together and begin to flex our collective voice. I am confident there will be more to come. We will not be idle as Trump attempts to impose his harmful agenda on our lives and our loved ones.
On a technical note — this was also an early usage of our DJI Osmo Mobile. I learned a few things — like that the provided DJI Go application does not post live video to Facebook and take videos at the same time very well. In addition to the event experience being positive, the experimenting with the Osmo Mobile was largely successful. Here are some videos and photos taken using this new setup.
