Politics

Demonstrators Build A "Wall of Kindness" Outside of Manhattan Trump Towers

March 19th 2016

Earlier this week, demonstrators gathered outside of Donald Trump's namesake 68-story tower tower in Midtown Manhattan to build a wall of sorts.

With large signs, protesters goaded the divisive Republican front-runner to "Build Kindness Not Walls."

Kindness wallYouTube/12 Kinds of Kindness - youtube.com

Since his presidential announcement last summer, one of Trump's signature — and most controversial — campaign platforms has been his intention to build a "a beautiful wall" along the U.S.-Mexico border in order to stop Central and South American immigrants from entering the country illegally.

The demonstrators, who reportedly stood outside Trump Tower for nearly two hours on Tuesday morning, were organized by Timothy Goodman and Jessica Walsh, graphic designers who have been behind numerous social experiment projects including 40 Days of Dating and 12 Kinds of Kindness. The "kindness wall" is a part of the larger 12 Kinds of Kindness campaign, the New York Times reported.

DemonstratorsYouTube/12 Kinds of Kindness - youtube.com

"Kindness has definitely been lacking this election cycle, but especially for Trump," Goodman told the Times. "It's scary and horrific to see him applauding violence and exclusion in this way."

Walsh and GoodmanYouTube/12 Kinds of Kindness - youtube.com

"History tells us that building walls, whether physically or metaphorically, only leads to more problems. We cannot be shutting people out based on religion, ethnicity, race, gender, [or] sex," Walsh says in a video about the project.

Donald Trump has received predictably negative blowback for his wall proposal, most recently from current and former Mexican politicians. Earlier this month, Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto compared Trump's anti-immigration rhetoric to that of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Days earlier, Treasury Secretary Luis Videgaray Caso "emphatically and categorically" declared that, contrary to Trump's plans, Mexico would not pay for any wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

In late February, the country's former president, Vicente Fox, said that he would not "pay for that fucking wall."

Though it has received impassioned pushback, Trump's proposed wall — and his immigration policy overall — have been important factors for his supporters. In February, ATTN: spoke to several young voters in New Hampshire, many of whom cited immigration reform among their top reasons for supporting the candidate.

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