Bay Area Elected Officials Among Several Arrested at May Day Protest at SFO

Local elected officials were among several people arrested during a rally at San Francisco International Airport on Friday, as activists planned May Day protests across the Bay Area and California, calling for an economic shutdown and demanding a country that puts workers before billionaires.

Supervisors Rafael Mandelman and Connie Chan, as well as state Sen. Josh Becker, D-Menlo Park, were detained by police, who planned to cite 20 to 25 protesters, according to an officer at the scene. Mandelman told KQED that they were cited for blocking a roadway and failing to disperse.

This year’s protests in the U.S. on International Workers’ Day are also taking aim at the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration agenda and high living costs — exacerbated by the U.S. war in Iran — that threaten to upend the lives of workers worldwide.

The rally at SFO, which demanded U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers out of the city, was led by the airport’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 in which officers forcefully detained a woman and her young child.

“San Francisco is a union town, San Francisco’s airport is the people’s airport,” Chan, who is running for Congress, said at the rally shortly before she was arrested.

The demonstrators who were detained and being processed Friday afternoon appear to have been among a group blocking the street outside the airport’s International Terminal.

“It’s a good day for the movement,” Sanjay Garla, first vice president at SEIU United Service Workers West, said as he was escorted through the terminal by police. “ICE out of SFO!”

More events are expected to kick off throughout the Bay Area on Friday afternoon. At 2 p.m., Mission Action, a group that advocates for the city’s immigrant and low-income residents, has planned an event at Civic Center, where a march to Embarcadero Plaza will follow a short program.

Along the way, the group will make three stops — outside the federal building at Seventh and Mission streets, another at Fourth and Mission, and the final outside Salesforce Tower, where they’ll be joined by a coalition of tech workers, according to Mission Action’s David Valencia.

Among the May Day Coalition’s demands are that leaders prioritize workers over the state’s ultra-wealthy and support a ballot measure that would impose a one-time, 5% tax on the assets of California’s roughly 200 billionaires, which qualified for the November ballot this week.

In East San José, rallies kick off at 2 p.m. at Story and King roads, with speakers and a 3.5-mile march to City Hall starting at 3 p.m. Organizers said they plan to have mini-rallies with speakers along the route, with three stops before arriving at City Hall, which organizers said on their website would be at roughly 6 p.m.

Across the Bay in East Oakland, 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., protesters will make a loop up 35th Street.

May Day, or International Workers’ Day, is a public holiday honoring labor in many countries.

In the Bay Area, the first May Day was celebrated in 1890 in Emeryville’s Shellmound Park, organized by carpenters and joiners unions, according to activist historians Left in the Bay. The labor celebrations overlapped with the festival celebrating the change of the seasons, commemorated throughout the northern hemisphere.

That May Day used to be a public holiday in San Francisco for schoolchildren, who danced around May Poles and were given free milk and cookies in city parks.

KQED’s María Fernanda Bernal and Farida Jhabvala Romero contributed to this report. This is a developing story, and it will be updated.