Bay Area ‘Free America’ Protests Mark First Year of Trump 2.0

It’s been one year since President Donald Trump’s second term began.

In the Bay Area, those 12 months have brought clashes with federal officers, threats to local landmarks like Alcatraz and the Presidio, fear of deportation to many immigrant communities and plenty of protests here in the Bay Area.

On the anniversary of Trump’s second inauguration, people across the Bay Area are joining hundreds of walkouts nationwide organized by Women’s March — a movement that began with the feminist protests in 2017.

Protesters plan to march through downtown San Francisco on Tuesday afternoon, starting at Civic Center Plaza, to decry what organizers say is the administration’s violent assault on Venezuela, immigration enforcement brutality and authoritarian rule.

“ We want to make sure that folks from Venezuela to Minnesota know that they’re not alone,” said Jane Martin, organizing director at Bay Resistance, one of the groups organizing the San Francisco rally. “We want to give folks here in the Bay who are outraged and upset about what’s happening a place to come and take action.”

Martin said Tuesday’s march represents a new strategy in resisting the Trump administration, beyond marching and “symbolic action.”

“ What we’re trying to move towards now is actually more non-cooperation and disruptive action that can actually prevent this regime from continuing to attack our communities,” Martin said.

Martin pointed to a planned general strike in Minneapolis on Friday, in protest of the ongoing immigration enforcement crackdown by the Trump administration there, as an example. She said Tuesday’s walkout was part of “building up and flexing those muscles,” with a goal of organizing “as big of an action as we can this May Day.”

Recent polling indicates that a majority of Americans disapprove of how U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operates.

A recent poll of U.S. adults by The Economist and YouGov showed that 47% of respondents said they believed ICE was making Americans less safe, as opposed to 34% who said ICE made Americans safer. In a recent Quinnipiac University National poll, 53% of U.S. voters said they thought the fatal shooting of Renee Good by ICE officers in Minneapolis earlier this month was not justified, while 35% thought it was justified.

Good’s death led to surges in support and interest in rapid response and immigration enforcement legal observer training in the Bay Area.

Francisco Herrera, the co-director of the Nuevo Sol Day Labor and Domestic Workers Center in San Francisco — which is co-organizing Tuesday’s march — called the killing a “public execution,” and a “deliberate attack to intimidate our communities right out of the workbook for dictators in Latin America.”

Although Trump called off a planned immigration enforcement surge in the Bay Area last October after San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie urged him to “rethink” the plan, Herrera said immigrant communities here are still living in fear.

“ What we’re seeing is people not willing to go out in the neighborhood because now you just need to be brown and you’re going to be picked up,” Herrera said. “ There’s a tremendous drop in the local economy because people are afraid to go to a restaurant or go shopping. So, it’s having a ripple effect that is harshly damaging our community.”

Herrera said he is grateful for the wider community that has stepped up to support immigrant communities through programs like Adopt-A-Corner, which help protect day laborers from immigration enforcement.

“More than a resistance, I think we are moving forward and pressing for democracy,” Herrera said.