Dozens of community advocates gathered at the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall at noon on Thursday to provide a clear and resounding message: They will protect local immigrant families targeted by the Trump administration with threats of detention and deportation.
Organized by the Bay Area nonprofit Bay Resistance, the event was described by a few of the speakers as the real beginning of the Bay Area’s fight against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdowns.
Francisco Herrera, who leads the immigrant defense committee at Bay Resistance and has also led a San Francisco day labor program, said that instead of saying good afternoon in the midday heat he would say “good morning,” because “it’s the beginning of the rest of our resistance lives.”
Organizers announced a joint statement from more than 150 Bay Area organizations calling on the Trump administration to stay out of the Bay Area and allow local officials to govern peacefully.
“The broad coalition will denounce the violence and damage the invasions of American cities have unleashed on working people, immigrant families, and local economies, and will pledge to stand united to protect each other from harm,” the statement reads.
San Francisco supervisors; nursing, engineering, and transit union leaders; the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, and Trabajadores Unidos Workers United, which represents Latino blue-collar workers, were also present.
Nurses with the labor union National Nurses United joined the “Free the Bay” rally at San Francisco City Hall on Oct. 23. Credit: Jose Fermoso/The Oaklandside
Some speakers led those gathered in protest songs, while others railed against federal persecution.
San Francisco Supervisor Shamann Walton said he was suspicious of President Donald Trump’s announcement Thursday morning that he was canceling a federal “surge” in the city, for now. People shook their heads angrily when protesters asked aloud whether they believed the drawback was permanent.
“Regardless of new announcements, we stand with our community,” Walton said. “And I’ll say that we have to be careful because we do not trust this administration to say you’re not coming, after you say you’re coming. We want to make sure our community is prepared to address the concerns and issues that come when we have federal troops invading our streets.”
Supervisor Connie Chan spoke of the local Chinese American community’s organizing against efforts to end birthright citizenship as a symbol of the power of standing up as immigrants.
“Today, our community is under attack as history is repeating itself, and we must stand in solidarity with immigrant brothers and sisters in San Francisco and across the Bay,” Chan said as drivers passing by honked from the street. “We must stand in solidarity. Federal agents — we have seen it before. Exclusion, home-raiding, division — and we have seen it all. It’s enough. It’s never again.”
Reverend Beverly Dalea, a United Church of Christ minister and co-executive director of the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity, said that his conversations with faith communities across the Bay Area told him they were united in pushing back against the growing threat posed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She also took time in her speech to detail the suffering of recent Asian immigrants who have been deported, and of a Chinese man, Huabing Xie, who was arrested in Tecate, California, and died in ICE detention two weeks ago.
“This is no time for silence. It’s no time for complacency,” she said, her voice rising. “And for those of us in the faith community, it’s a time to live out our values of equality and freedom — and what it means to be a good neighbor. Our faith traditions tell us that government should be for the good of the people.”
Dalea said that the money spent on immigration enforcement against law-abiding people could be better used to build more housing and public transportation. “This is our money,” she said.
The loudest cheers during the event came when Supervisor Jackie Fielder, a noted progressive, took to the podium and called the Trump federal government “a fascist administration.”
“We don’t negotiate with terrorists,” she bellowed. “We are not the aggressors. They are. They’re the ones spewing threats to invade our communities. They’re the ones threatening to march into our neighborhoods, onto our doorsteps. And they did in Alameda this morning when Border Patrol fired stun grenades and tear gas on faith leaders.”
Herrera, the Bay Resistance organizer, said that he’d heard from families who weren’t attending school or going to work because of a pervasive fear of being arrested.
“Every place where Black and Brown people gather is now a vulnerable space,” he said.
Herrera asked members of the community to participate in a program, led by Nuevo Sol Day Labor & Domestic Worker Center, to “adopt a corner” in their community where immigrants gather to find work, keep an eye out for possible immigration enforcement agents, and call their hotline at 415-529-WORK (9675) about sightings. Herrera said that as of today, organizers had identified 18 corners in San Francisco, about seven or eight in Oakland, and another five in Berkeley that were being monitored and needed more volunteers.
Wednesday night, during a Zoom learning session on immigrant defense actions, a Bay Resistance staffer explained why street corner adoption was so useful. They said that visible street-level solidarity has been shown to deter abductions, especially when people were on site before enforcement vehicles arrived. Even if agents remove an immigrant with observers present, they explained, it’s still useful for future legal proceedings to document the number of vehicles involved, the specific agency involved, and faces of the arresting officers.
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