LOUISVILLE (WHAS11) -- Images of children separated from their parents, sometimes confined in cage-like facilities, have been splashed onto television screens, computer monitors and newspapers, drawing the ire of many people around the nation on both sides of the political spectrum.
"The images that we see, they tear at the heart," Mayor Greg Fischer, D.-Louisville, said. "They're not tearing any anybody from a political perspective, so they know it's wrong and say, 'I didn't know America was this way.'"
"It is time to stop the prejudice, to stop the bigotry, to stop the division, for all of us to be as God intends us to be, and that is as one family," Kentucky State Rep. Jim Wayne, D.-District 35, said.
Thursday afternoon, hundreds of people took to downtown Louisville to rally outside the Louisville ICE headquarters on Broadway protesting the Trump administration's immigration policy, which they say mistreats refugees and immigrants.
"It affects us all," Dave Cooper, one of the protest's organizers, said. "To quote Martin Luther King, 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.'"
Cooper said the planning began over the weekend before President Donald Trump signed an executive order that the White House said will keep families that have crossed the border illegally together. But Cooper and others said the executive order is not enough, and that questions still remain about what the order will actually do, and more importantly, what will happen with the more than 2,300 children already separated from their parents.
"They're not coming here on a lark or because they can get a better stereo, something like that," he said. "They're coming here out of desperation."
According to Cooper, more needs to be done about the country's immigration policy. He said it begins with people putting themselves in the shoes of those seeking to enter the United States.
"To be perfectly honest, if I was in that situation, if I woke up every morning here in Louisville to the sound of gunfire, if there were mortar shells falling on Bardstown Road, I would do whatever I could, legally or illegally, to get my family to safety," he said.