“Muslims Welcome”

“No ban. No wall. America is for us all.”

“Jews against the Muslim ban”

“HOPE”

“The First Americans were seeking religious freedom”

Fluorescent, pen and ink signs of America’s civic religion bobbed and swayed atop the wave of peaceful protesters in front of RDU’s Terminal 2, providing a closed captions summary of why two thousand North Carolinians had so suddenly, and remarkably gathered at the state’s largest international airport.

One woman, a college student at NC State, had recently received her citizenship at the end of a journey that saw her come to the U.S. as a refugee. She said she came because she knew what it was like for a child not to know if she’d ever find a home again. She was led here by her heart, while the rest of her body followed. And what she hoped for was a saner, fairer policy for an earlier version of herself.

There was a man in his thirties, born and raised in North Carolina, who said he rolled out of bed this morning with a sense of purpose to be a physical representation of the victory of the ACLU in the Eastern District of New York the night before, when Judge Ann Donnelly did her best to halt the chaotic scenes playing out in detention centers across America’s international airports.

A veteran North Carolina lawyer and former board member of the ACLU herself held aloft a sign with thick lettering, a passage from a statute marked by hand-written section signs (§), the key passages of the statute underlined. It was the Establishment Clause she said, and she was here because President Trump’s executive order, a naked ban against Muslims, violated the separation of church and state that it had enshrined in the Constitution — the neon yellow underlines pointed out how for the banner scanners amidst the crowd.

Dozens of family units arrived, children perched on shoulders, with one little girl around four years of age, her short bob rustled by the wind as she was held in the air by her father, holding a hastily printed ink-jet photograph of a similar-looking girl with a pony tail, and a message scribbled underneath “This little girl is three years old. She is my cousin. She was denied entry to the U.S.”