The event was part of CureFest for Childhood Cancer, a two-day event to raise money and awareness for childhood cancer cures.
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“We ended up waiting at the gates for two hours, and they never let us in”, Natasha Gould, an 11-year-old who has an inoperable brain tumor, told the Post. “And to be clear, the entire crowd was half kids”. “Many children told us they went back to hotel rooms and cried”.
The Secret Service has apologized for removing attendees of an event in Lafayette Square, many of them children suffering from cancer. “But we think a little consideration would have gone a long way”.
Closures of Lafayette Square have occurred often since the September 11 terror attacks.
Anna Rose says the Secret Service announced the security closure for presidential movement at 7:15 p.m. President Barack Obama spoke later that night at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual awards dinner Saturday night.
Nicole Mainor, a spokeswoman for the Secret Service, said Monday that Clancy did make the call to Gillette.
If organizers knew that the closure would last hours, they could have moved the program to the hotel and walked to the other side of the White House for the vigil.
Gillette said the incident began Saturday afternoon when the group was asked to leave the park.
Requests for comment from the Secret Service and CureFest were not immediately returned. “We’re just a bunch of families who care about kids with cancer”. “And…we understand the need to keep our president safe”, organizer Michael Gillette, a documentary filmmaker from Fairfax City, Va, told The Washington Post.
“I thought it was just because the president was out, and they didn’t want to let us in because the president was there”, Veazey said.
This was in response to the White House’s refusal to light up in the color of gold in support for the cause, as they have done, in other colors, for other causes.
To give some context: this is what the event looked like previous year .
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Last year, Congress launched an investigation of the Secret Service following a series of security breaches and scandals, including several fence-jumping incidents.
