It’s been over a month since Donald Trump took energy, after working a marketing campaign soaked in anti-immigrant tirades and threats of mass deportation. The media have targeting these threats, however even progressive shops paid little consideration to the responses of the communities threatened. But marches and demonstrations have been widespread in Mexican communities.
These protests typically happen not in city facilities, which usually obtain extra media consideration, however within the Mexican barrios of the city fringe. San Mateo is one — on the San Francisco Peninsula south of town. Fort Bragg is one other — a former mill and fishing city three hours north of San Francisco, the place Mexican kids are a majority within the small metropolis’s colleges.
These will not be the well mannered petitions of victims pleading for a softer repression. They’re indignant protests — persons are out within the streets, not cowering behind closed doorways. They carry indicators with denunciations that declare “MAGA: Mexicans Ain’t Going Wherever!” or “I drink my horchata heat as a result of Fuck ICE!”
Younger Mexican ladies — some born right here, some who got here as kids, and others who simply arrived — carry U.S. flags, not out of false patriotism, however demanding recognition as an important a part of the nation, belonging to this nation’s material. The numerous, many Mexican flags have necessary which means. They converse of pleasure in Mexico as a rustic with a progressive authorities, in distinction to our reactionary one. They demand that the Mexican presence on this nation be acknowledged as effectively, with rights and respect for Mexican individuals.
Not all of the flags are Mexican or U.S., Hondurans carry their very own, as do Salvadorans and Guatemalans. Some marchers wave the Philippines’ flag with the same message — recognition for a neighborhood with centuries of historical past, going again to the imperial battle that made their homeland a U.S. colony and past.
These marches with their flags and indicators are harbingers of change. They’re not but as massive because the protests that passed off in 2006, with its hundreds of thousands within the streets. However they’re rising. They’re overwhelmingly organized and led by younger individuals and girls, and so they deserve recognition.
The advantage of organized resistance goes past combating immigration raids. The actions of immigrant employees, their households and their communities have traditionally fought for deeper social change, past deportation protection. They’ve proven nice persistence and strategic imaginative and prescient, as they fought threats of deportation whereas imagining a way forward for larger equality, working-class rights and social solidarity. That imaginative and prescient is as essential to defeating repression as motion within the streets.
Within the circulate of individuals crossing the border, “we see our households and coworkers, whereas this method solely sees cash,” says Rene Saucedo, an organizer for the Northern California Coalition for Simply Immigration Reform, a grassroots immigrant rights group that has organized marches and demonstrations supporting the Registry Invoice. “So we have now to battle for what we actually want, and never simply what we don’t need.” Marchers carried indicators selling an alternative choice to deportation, the Registry Invoice, HR 1511. This proposal would open authorized standing to an estimated 8 million individuals by permitting undocumented immigrants to use for authorized everlasting residence. Among the anti-deportation marchers have been veterans of earlier marches final 12 months and the 12 months earlier than, demanding the passage of this invoice.
Stepping out is the precondition for mobilizing the assist of a broader progressive neighborhood behind these protests. The images right here can’t probably embody all of the marches or present each side of them. Their objective is to make seen the essential position of the Mexican neighborhood in inspiring a fightback to Trump fascism throughout the board. They present who’s on the market organizing and main it. Their picket indicators and flags graphically current their calls for.
As a result of the brand new Trump regime is seizing databases beforehand not beneath federal management, and has refined instruments to trace these it targets, there are not any particular person captions for these images and no naming of the people in them. They have been taken in February 2025 in San Mateo and Fort Bragg, California.
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