On Tuesday, Aug. 27, a rally filled Oakland’s Chinatown neighborhood to protest the Trump administration’s ‘public charge rule,’ set to go into effect Oct. 15. And Thi Bui and a group of illustrators from the group Art Hack were there to document it.
Under the rule, any immigrant receiving public benefits such as Medicaid, housing assistance or food stamps for over 12 months within a 36-month period would be considered a “public charge,” and thus would be less eligible to receive a green card.
It’s a personal issue for Bui, the Caldecott Award-winning illustrator and the creator of the graphic memoir The Best We Could Do, a memoir about her family leaving Vietnam and coming to America in the late 1970s.
“My family, like many, used public benefits when we first arrived in the United States,” Bui says. “It’s hard to imagine how we would have survived, much less gone on to thrive and help others in our careers, without that crucial help in the beginning.”
In Oakland on Tuesday, as attendees protested the effects the rule would have on working class immigrant families, the illustrators and cartoonists of Art Hack chronicled the day: real people, in their own words, in illustrations and comics.
See their drawings below.
Art by Mallory Moser.
Art by Innosanto Nagara.
Art by Thi Bui.
Art by Megan Leppla.
Art by Gerry Chow.
Art by François Luong.