At a protest in St. Louis on Wednesday called “March to Defend Immigrant Rights,” participants chanted, “From Ferguson to Palestine, occupation is a crime!” invoking unrest in Ferguson, Mo., over police brutality in 2014 and Palestinian freedom.
The scene encapsulated how the left’s decades-long embrace of intersectionality — the concept that all oppressed people are linked — gives the protest movement large numbers of supporters but also can create a cacophony of messages.
The forces stirring action on the streets this week have been led by labor groups. And many protests, including those in Los Angeles, have continued to focus on workplace raids. But the voices at other protests are mixed, an echo of the wide array of progressive forces that have animated every anti-Trump protest this year.
Those earlier actions have been coordinated affairs, planned in advance for weeks by large groups like MoveOn and Indivisible, which have helped keep actions focused on concerns like cuts to Medicaid and Social Security, the power of billionaires and immigration policies. But in this week’s spontaneous actions, the many interests from the broad base of anti-Trump activists came to the fore, including more explicit support for racial justice, Palestinian freedom and socialist politics.
“In this moment we must all stand together,” said Becky Pringle, the head of the National Education Association, the largest individual union in the country and one of the groups that sprang into action as the protests emerged in Los Angeles.
Local chapters of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a Communist Party offshoot of the Workers World Party, have also played a leading role, working with local leftist groups to post information about new demonstrations from California to Maine.
The group’s concerns are among the mélange of causes animating protests that were born out of workplace raids to round up illegal immigrants. Palestinian supporters have shown up at protests in Chicago, New York and elsewhere. When the St. Louis march ended on Wednesday, various groups took the opportunity to rally support for queer rights, Black Lives Matter and tornado relief and cleanup efforts.
The St. Louis march was promoted on social media by the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Voices for Palestine Network, Black Men Build St. Louis and the Ecosocialist Green Party.
“St. Louis is a small city, and a lot of the people that care about organizing for human rights tend to all work loosely with each other through an unofficial coalition,” said Kaitlyn Killgo, one of the activists.
The presence of many different causes can dilute the message of any one protest — and risks appearing to general observers like a gathering of far-left activists. This issue is a familiar one for mainstream Democrats. While parsing their losses in the 2024 election, they have debated whether they diminished their appeal to the public by treating all causes as equally important.
Community networks have galvanized protesters in other cities. When Laura Valdez, a civil rights activist in San Francisco, saw the video of ICE agents detaining a prominent labor leader in Los Angeles, she believed that immigrants and activists faced a new level of danger.
“This was a four-alarm fire,” said Ms. Valdez, the executive director of Mission Action, an advocacy organization for low-income and immigrant communities. “We needed to activate.”
The video of the labor leader’s arrest was taken on Friday. By Monday, Ms. Valdez and Mission Action were participating in one of dozens of protests that sprang up across the country in response to the Trump administration’s immigration raids.
The rapid appearance of people on the streets of so many American cities was not a coincidence. Mission Action and other left-leaning organizations were able to mobilize quickly because they have spent all year protesting President Trump’s policies; several gatherings attracted hundreds of thousands of participants. Their networks were primed.
On Monday, the Austin, Texas, chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation posted on social media: “Emergency protest: solidarity with LA! We’ll see y’all tomorrow at the state capitol to say ‘ICE out of our cities! Stop the deportations!’”
That same day, the People’s Forum, a New York City workers’ rights organization, told supporters that there would be a protest the following day in solidarity with Los Angeles. “We refuse to be silenced! The people of New York City demand ICE get out of our communities, stop the deportations, and stop the raids.”
On June 10, the Maine chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation put out the word on social media: “Emergency Protest. From LA to Bangor: ICE Out! June 11 — 6:30pm. Pierce Park.”
Reaction to the Trump administration has brought a broad swath of progressive groups in close coordination, with leaders often speaking multiple times a day about how various policies are affecting their communities.
“Ultimately, this comes down to workers’ rights,” Ms. Pringle said.
Mr. Trump’s desire to remove undocumented immigrants from the country has had an especially galvanizing effect among left-leaning organizations. The coalition of centrist Democratic nonprofits and far-left national and local organizations that stood together during the first Trump administration splintered over whether to support Palestinians after the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas.
In addition to coordinating anti-Trump protests, progressive groups have been working to educate immigrant workers, students, educators and religious leaders about their rights and to connect them with mutual aid and legal assistance.
When ICE agents began entering workplaces in Los Angeles late last week, that network went on high alert. “We could see that the government had decided it would be more effective to apprehend hundreds of people through workplace enforcement rather than having several agents try to go after one person at a time,” Ms. Valdez said.
And then came the arrest of David Huerta, the president of the Service Employees International Union of California, as he recorded a video of the immigration raid. The service employees union and other national and local union leaders began to talk about how to respond. They supported the idea of public opposition.
Other unions reached out to the SEIU to ask how they could help. Following the SEIU’s lead, they decided that the best course of action was to bring public attention to Mr. Huerta’s arrest and to denounce Mr. Trump’s decision to use federal force to quell protests.
“Labor is everywhere,” said Ms. Pringle, whose organization was in touch with the SEIU. “The three million educators in the National Education Association are in every congressional district and community.” The California Teachers Association and other progressive state organizations committed to push out messaging and encourage citizens to protest, a pattern that was replicated across the country.
Since Friday, and following the deployment of the National Guard, a broad coalition of organizations has called on the public to join demonstrations in downtown Los Angeles. They include Unión del Barrio, a grass roots group with volunteer membership that describes itself as revolutionary and anti-imperialist, and Local Black Lives Matter leaders.
“This is our fight. This is our fight,” Melina Abdullah, a co-founder of the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter, said in a recent video on social media.
“For both moral and strategic reasons, this is a Black fight.”
In New York City, protests have coalesced outside the federal immigration headquarters in Lower Manhattan this week. But they have typically morphed into a stew of left-wing causes, with Palestinian calls for liberation and Occupy Wall Street chants overtaking the group’s message against deportations.
A large rally that began at 5 p.m. on Tuesday drew hundreds of demonstrators, including immigrant New Yorkers who said they were rallying on behalf of parents, friends and relatives who were undocumented. They marched to chants of “Abolish ICE,” and carried yellow signs, in English and Spanish, that said “ICE out of NYC.”
But by 10 p.m., as much of the protest had dissipated, a splinter group of about 100 protesters remained, some wearing tactical looking outfits and kaffiyehs, appearing more intent on taunting police officers and causing disruption with sporadic chants of Palestinian liberation.
At a protest this week in Chicago, many protesters also wore kaffiyehs and carried signs supporting Palestinians. Some of the loudest chants heard downtown were targeted at U.S. policy in Gaza: “From Palestine to Mexico these border walls have got to go!”
The spontaneous protests that erupted this week are a preview of what is to come on Saturday — a long-planned, nationwide protest against the Trump administration called No Kings, scheduled to coincide with the president’s birthday and military parade.
Several prominent progressive coalitions planned No Kings, including MoveOn, Indivisible and 50501.
There will be no event in Washington, the site of Mr. Trump’s parade. Organizers want to draw attention to the president’s many opponents throughout the country. In addition to the flagship march that will take place in Philadelphia, organizers said there will be No Kings marches in at least 2,000 cities and towns, in every state in the country.
Miram Jordan contributed reporting from Los Angeles, and Julie Bosman from Chicago.
Katie Benner is a correspondent writing primarily about large institutions that shape American life.
Luis Ferré-Sadurní is a Times reporter covering immigration, focused on the influx of migrants arriving in the New York region.
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