Oakland, CA – Over 20,000 people filled the streets of Oakland on Saturday, March 28, at the third No Kings rally to protest Trump’s agenda.
The demonstration began at noon at Oscar Grant Plaza in downtown Oakland, where attendees heard from speakers representing labor, faith, environmental justice and immigrant rights organizations. At 1 p.m., the crowd marched toward Lake Merritt for additional speakers focused on building momentum for the Bay Area’s upcoming May Day actions.
Organizers worked for weeks to mobilize for the event. The Oakland chapter of the Community Service Organization (CSO Oakland), a member of the Legalization for All Network, led multiple art builds alongside partner immigrant rights organizations Mujeres Unidas y Activas and Pangea Legal Services, groups also involved in Oakland’s upcoming May Day actions and the Justice for Guillermo campaign. Revolutionary groups such as the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) also took part.
The event featured over 40 organizations and unions, including Indivisible East Bay, East Bay DSA, SEIU 1021, the Alameda Labor Council, Bay Resistance, Berkeley Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine, CAIR-SFBA, Friends of La Peña Immigrant Rights, Jewish Voice for Peace Bay Area, the Oakland Education Association, Sunrise Movement Bay Area, and Tsuru for Solidarity.
“Today the people of Oakland made our voices heard: the accelerating atrocity of the Trump administration must go,” said Noah Teller of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. “We are building a strategic alliance to protect oppressed people and develop the power of the working class. We demand legalization for all and no war in our name!”
The protest reflected growing frustration among working-class residents over the Trump administration’s policies, including its crackdown on immigrants, attacks on LGBTQ rights, executive orders further militarizing the police, and U.S.-Israeli escalations in the Middle East, particularly their attacks on Iran, all while people across the country struggle with rising costs of living.
Anti-Trump organizing in Oakland continues to grow. Last year, after the administration threatened to send over 100 ICE agents to the San Francisco Bay Area, CSO Oakland, FRSO, and the Oakland chapter of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression organized an emergency protest from Fruitvale to the Coast Guard Island Bridge, where ICE planned to establish its headquarters. Organizers have also mobilized against a proposed ICE detention facility in Dublin, California, and to stop the deportation of Bay Area activist Guillermo Medina Reyes.
“The more that Trump tries to harm our communities, the more our communities will fight back,” said Danny Celaya from CSO Oakland. “We’ve seen that from the students who have been walking out of class to protest mass deportations, the brave souls who have been keeping our communities safe such as Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, whose lives were taken from them by ICE state thugs, to the millions who have taken to the streets across the country from cities like LA, Chicago and Minneapolis to towns like Billings, Montana; Charleston, South Carolina, and Decorah, Iowa. All of which have a member organization of the Legalization for All Network. In short, people are getting organized, we will stop Trump’s racist agenda, and we will win.”
CSO Oakland also distributed flyers at the march for a fundraiser to support Guillermo Medina Reyes’ family while a coalition of Bay Area organizations, of which CSO Oakland is a part, continues fighting for his release from a for-profit detention center in California City owned by CoreCivic, one of more than 40 private detention centers the company operates. Donations can be made here.
Private companies run roughly 90% of immigration detention centers nationwide.
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