“LIFT up the lamp at the golden door!” Adriano Espaillat shouted into the microphone, invoking the last line of “The New Colossus,” the poem engraved in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. His amplified words carried over a cheering crowd of thousands packed into Battery Park in downtown Manhattan. Their mittened hands lifted signs that read “No Ban, No Wall” and “Patrol White Supremacy, Not Borders”. Mr Espaillat, the first Dominican-American member of Congress, came to America as an undocumented immigrant. Behind him, in New York Harbour, stood Ellis Island and Lady Liberty herself.

The protests began the day before at a modern Ellis Island—Terminal 4 at Kennedy International Airport. On the afternoon of January 27th , Donald Trump signed an executive order severely restricting travellers from seven predominantly Muslim countries. Its effects took hold on January 28th when travellers from those countries were being detained by the Department of Homeland Security in airports across the country, in a fog of confusion about the order’s reach. Word of the detentions quickly spread, and the crowds at the airport grew steadily throughout the afternoon. Demonstrators chanted “LET THEM IN”. Young civil liberties lawyers sat huddled on airport floors, drafting habeas petitions on laptops to free the detainees. The demonstrations spread to airports serving Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, Portland, Dan Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC.

Just before 9pm, a federal judge in Brooklyn granted a limited and temporary stay of Mr Trump’s executive order, freeing the detainees who had been travelling when the executive order was enacted. Similar stays followed from courts in Alexandria, Boston, and Seattle.

Opponents of the ban, buoyed by the small but speedy judicial victory, were back in force in New York the next day. Many had been at the airport protests, and many also at the women’s march a week before. One makeshift sign on a piece of old cardboard read, “So much to protest, I’m out of poster board.” They congregated in front of Castle Clinton, a national monument and the country’s official immigrant processing centre in the 1800s. A trio of senators, a handful of other congressman, and the mayor took the stage along with Mr Espaillat.

“It is an absolute moral and ethical failure,” Kirsten Gillibrand, the junior senator from New York, said of the ban. “It goes against everything we New Yorkers stand for.” An especially loud protester standing near your blogger declared that Ms Gillibrand is certain to be the next president.

“We are here today to deliver a vociferous, vociferous ‘No’ to the president and these executive orders,” Chuck Schumer, the senator from New York, told the crowd. “They are against everything that is American.”

Your blogger couldn’t hear many of the rest of the remarks given by Mr Schumer, or by Cory Booker, the senator from New Jersey, as the crowd erupted in chants of “Stop confirming!” (Thus far, Mr Schumer had voted in favour of all of Mr Trump’s cabinet nominees.)

The throngs wound their way out of the park and up Greenwich Street, toward the Javits Federal Building, the home of the field office of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. At the corner of Church Street and Liberty Street, the marchers slowed, and their chant grew even louder: “No hate! No fear! Refugees are welcome here!” According to Bill de Blasio, the city’s mayor, 17 travellers were still being held at Kennedy Airport that afternoon.

It was not only protesters in the streets who were making a noise. Attorneys-general from 15 states and Washington, DC condemned the order. New York’s attorney-general, Eric Schneiderman, echoed the protest signs, using the hashtag #NoBanNoWall on Twitter, and calling the order unconstitutional. Christian religious leaders came out against it as “discriminatory, misguided and inhumane.” Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, vowed to take in refugees rejected by Mr Trump, tweeting “Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith.” Heads of state of Britain, France, Germany, and Italy expressed their disagreement and scepticism over the American president’s order. Iraq, a key American ally against Islamic State, was “taken aback,” having learned of the ban through American news media.

In response, Mr Trump’s administration appeared to tap the brakes on its locomotive. The administration said the ban would not apply to people with green cards, and the Department of Homeland Security declared legal residents exempt from the order. But on Sunday night, confusion still reigned. The homepage of the New York Times declared that the “White House scales back immigration ban”; at the same time the BBC insisted that “Trump stands firm over travel ban.” In a statement, Mr Trump said that the order was "not about religion—this is about terror and keeping our country safe".

Later that evening, Yvette Clarke, a Democratic congresswoman representing a large swath of Brooklyn, held an “emergency meeting” in a small, nondescript halal restaurant in her district. The gathering was meant to rally her like-minded constituents opposed to the ban, and to educate, prepare, and reassure those who feared the order’s effects on themselves or their families. According to the Census Bureau, 40% of Ms Clarke’s district is foreign-born, and roughly 3,000 of her constituents were born in the countries—Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen—on Mr Trump’s list.

Bundled against the cold, hundreds stood crammed shoulder-to-shoulder under fluorescent lights, deathly quiet, straining to hear their congresswoman over the feeble sound system. The crowd overflowed out the open door, blocking the sidewalk on the otherwise quiet Coney Island Avenue, and dozens outside peered in through the windows. An imam from a nearby mosque stood in front of a giant American flag that covered the restaurant’s entire back wall, and began the meeting with a prayer in Arabic.

“I share in your outrage,” Ms Clarke told the crowd. “Imam, I ask that you pray for me. Because I’m going to Washington tomorrow, and I’m gonna act up!”

Correction (January 31st): This piece has been amended to correct the spelling of Senator Booker’s first name. It is Cory, not Corey. Apologies.