Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Draws Out May Day Crowds in the Bay Area

This May Day, thousands across the Bay Area are expected to take up the cause of workers, joining thousands nationwide in protesting the Trump administration’s immigration agenda and economic inequality.

Hundreds of labor unions and community groups across the country are adopting the slogan “No work, no school, no shopping,” a tactic also used by protestors in Minneapolis after it became the target of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement surge last December.

The coalition is calling on people to stop those daily activities, and instead take to the streets to protest ICE, the U.S.’s war with Iran and a system they say is enriching corporations and billionaires at the expense of workers.

“In the past year, we’ve seen a lot of our immigrant community being under attack,” said Citlali Fermin, who’s co-coordinating May Day actions in Oakland. “We’ve seen our community in fear. We’ve seen our children not showing up to school, and so our goal for May Day is to bring our community to march in the streets with us.”

Bay Area organizers said the ramp-up of ICE activity over the last year has brought increased scale and urgency to International Workers Day.

“ICE, the [Make America Great Again] regime is expanding and ICE [is] entering into really this militarized force that is affecting our neighborhoods, our workplaces,” said David Valencia with Mission Action, which is one of the lead organizations coordinating events in San Francisco.

“That’s why we see a lot more community members … taking the streets not just to resist, but also to reclaim May Day for what it is: and that is a declaration that working people will not be ruled by any regime,” he continued.

In San Francisco, actions are set to start at San Francisco International Airport at 11 a.m., with an “ICE Out of San Francisco” rally. The event will be led by SFO’s passenger service workers, who are preparing for a Board of Supervisors hearing next week over low wages. SFO was also the site of a high-profile altercation with ICE last month, where agents forcefully detained a woman and her young child. The New York Times reported that TSA tipped off ICE that the mom and daughter would be traveling through the airport before the arrest.

At 2 p.m. Friday, Mission Action has planned an event at Civic Center, where there’ll be a short program followed by a march to the Embarcadero Plaza. Along the way, the group will make three stops, outside the federal building at 7th Street and Mission, another at 4th Street and Mission, and the final outside of Salesforce, where they’ll be joined by a coalition of tech workers, according to Valencia. Among the May Day Coalition’s demands are to prioritize workers over the ultra-rich, and in California, a ballot measure that would impose a one-time, 5% tax on the assets of California’s roughly 200 billionaires qualified for the November ballot this week.

When the march ends at Embarcadero Plaza, Valencia said he hopes participants will spill into the city’s third and final major action of the day, a march led by the San Francisco Labor Council.

David Huerta, the president of the Service Employees International Union–United Service Workers, said organizers are expecting this year’s event to be especially large. While the labor movement has traditionally come together with immigrant rights groups and other community organizations on May Day, there’s a sense of particular unity across the sectors of immigration, labor and economic justice.

Huerta, who was tackled and detained by immigration agents last June at a protest during a workplace immigration raid in Los Angeles, said Friday’s rallies are an “accumulation of that resistance for the past year and a half.”

“I think right now, this resistance is coming to a head, and hopefully it will demonstrate its power and flex its power on May 1,” he said.

Across the Bay in East Oakland, Fermin’s organization, Trabajadores Unidos Workers United, is co-organizing a rally and march in Fruitvale, a majority Latino neighborhood.

The event will begin with a resource fair at Fruitvale Plaza at 2 p.m., followed by a slate of speakers at 3 p.m. Around 4 p.m., she said, protesters will make a loop up 35th Street.

Fermin said she understands that not everyone may be able to fulfill the May Day Coalition’s work boycott, but urged people to turn out to a local event regardless.

“A lot of us are trying to survive and work every day, are trying to go to school every day. But I think what’s more important is to show our community that we’re here, that we’re taking on the streets, and that we are fighting for justice,” she said.

Elsewhere in the Bay Area, there are a number of smaller events planned from San José to the North Bay. Huerta said the day is an important moment for organizing the working class ahead of November’s midterm elections. Primaries in California will be just over a month after May Day’s activities, on June 2.

“We are in a fight with an authoritarian. We know the only way we can defeat authoritarianism is by winning elections,” he said. “But in order to be able to win elections, we have to organize the voters. We have to organize the masses. We have to organize working people.

“This is an opportunity to flex that power,” he continued.

KQED’s Farida Jhabvala Romero contributed to this report.