Civil Rights and MLK Legacy

MLK Day was marked by protests and efforts to "reclaim" the holiday as activists and community leaders warned the fraught U.S. political climate could enable civil‑rights rollbacks under the Trump era. Tensions were amplified by sharp rhetoric from public figures, including a former DHS official who called Gov. Tim Walz's comparison of immigrant children to Anne Frank "disgusting" and inflammatory.

President Donald Trump issued a formal Martin Luther King Jr. Day proclamation Monday evening only after civil-rights groups criticized him for breaking with recent presidential practice by neither attending public commemorations nor recognizing the holiday earlier in the day. The proclamation, released while Trump spent the holiday at Mar-a-Lago and prepared to attend the college football championship in Miami, praised King’s “extraordinary resolve” and tied his legacy to “law, order, liberty, and justice for all,” echoing the administration’s current enforcement rhetoric. Trump also claimed he honored King last year by declassifying assassination files, a move historians said produced little new information and that most of King’s family had opposed. The White House did not promote the proclamation on Trump’s or the administration’s social-media feeds, which instead focused on immigration crackdowns and football, and the timing drew fire from the NAACP and other advocates who saw it as an afterthought. Bernice King, Dr. King’s daughter, used the day to urge Americans to push for an end to “state-sanctioned and facilitated violence” against Black and Brown immigrants and others, underscoring how Trump’s immigration policies and rhetoric are reshaping the politics of a holiday meant to honor nonviolent civil-rights struggle.