CHICAGO — Michelle Nolasco, a 20-year-old DePaul University student from Orland Park, Illinois, held a sign that read: “I was supposed to be at school … Instead, I am here, fighting for mi familia y mi gente,” meaning “my family and my people.”
“I feel like being in class is not as important as being here,” Nolasco, a child of undocumented immigrants from Mexico, said Thursday. She was among thousands who gathered in Union Park to mark May Day with speeches and signs before marching through downtown to Grant Park later in the afternoon, where speakers — including Mayor Brandon Johnson — addressed the rally.
May Day — also known as International Workers’ Day — is a global holiday commemorating the labor rights movement, in which Chicago played a pivotal role.
Across the nation and the world, hundreds of thousands demonstrated Thursday to champion workers’ rights as well as to denounce the Trump administration’s widespread crackdowns on immigration, its economic policies and disruptive global tariffs.
Immigration has become a major focus of May Day rallies in the U.S. since 2006, when roughly one million people — nearly half a million in Chicago alone — marched as part of a nationwide movement against tough, proposed, federal anti-immigration reforms. The legislation, called the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act, would have criminalized living in the U.S. without legal permission, making it a felony.
Nearly 20 years after those first rallies, the crowd in Chicago erupted Thursday into chants of “No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here!” Some said the struggle was all too familiar.
“I was one of the main conveners of the 2006 mega march on March 10 and then on May 1 of 2006, and having to fight against it all over again is obviously a deja vu,” said Omar Lopez, 80, a member of the Central Committee of the Consejo de Resistencia en Defensa del Inmigrante, the body that made the initial call for people to take to the streets.
Since President Donald Trump was sworn into office in January, his administration has launched immigration raids across the country, urged others to self-deport, canceled foreign students’ visas, and even deported legal residents without due process. “We will close the border. We will stop the invasion of illegals into our country,” Trump said during his campaign.
From April 21-26, federal and local authorities arrested 1,120 Floridians in an effort dubbed “Operation Tidal Wave,” according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Earlier that month, the administration sent over 200 migrants to a notorious maximum-security prison in El Salvador in a wave of arbitrary arrests and deportations that 20 United Nations human rights experts deemed “contrary to international law.”
“This is a life-and-death question for the labor movement and for the whole working class, not just for those that are immigrants: It has to do with the unity of the working class and our ability to fight for our own interests,” said David Rosenfeld, a Chicago-based railroad worker who is a member of the Socialist Workers Party and the SMART Transportation Division. “That’s why I’m particularly proud of my union, the SMART Transportation union, which has been standing up for our member, Kilmar Abrego García.”
García, a first-year apprentice with the union with no criminal convictions who was living in Maryland, was wrongfully deported to his native El Salvador — despite a 2019 court order shielding him from being sent there due to the risk of persecution by local gangs that had terrorized his family. The Trump administration called the deportation “an administrative error” but contended García was a member of the MS-13 gang, an allegation a federal judge questioned and the man’s wife and lawyer denied. Officials later added domestic abuse to the list of allegations, actions his wife acknowledged but explained, adding that “Kilmar is a loving partner and father.”
A federal judge, an appeals court and the Supreme Court have all ordered the government to facilitate García’s return to the country, but the administration has argued in court that it had no means of doing so.
Although immigration became a focus of the event, it was not the only one.
“We have groups that have other grievances against what’s coming out of Washington, and they’re also using this as a vehicle to express their grievances,” Lopez said. “Now, we see a broader coalition than we did in 2006.”
Some organizations were planning to organize their own May Day events but decided to follow the lead of the Central Committee.
“We were going to put on a May Day march that was specifically geared towards women and fem-identifying workers,” said Jill Manrique, an executive director at Chicago Jobs With Justice. “But when we found out that this was happening, we joined up—we didn’t want to split solidarity.”
According to Lopez, this year’s coalition included 175 organizations—from unions to faith-based groups—from across Illinois, including DuPage and McHenry counties and cities like Elgin, Rockford and Aurora. Unlike the recent “Hands Off!” campaign that spanned more than 30 cities throughout the state, the May Day rallies were held only in Chicago and Evanston. Still, many from outside the city joined the Union Park event.
One protester who would give only his first name for fear of retribution, Ashton — a young trans man from Ottawa, Illinois — drove a couple of hours to the event.
“It’s absolutely insane that we need to do this,” he said. “I keep seeing people saying, you know, if a child needs to be an activist, we’ve already failed them, and this is absolutely freaking true.”
Some organizations arranged transportation to bring people from outside the city.
“The eight buses that our organization is bringing are coming mainly from the Southwest suburbs like Bolingbrook, Plainfield, Romeoville, Joliet, Naperville and Lockport,” said Margarita Morelos, a co-founder of Casa Aguascalientes Chicago, a non-profit working to empower the Hispanic community. “But other organizations are having buses coming from other places, like the North Side and the West Side of Chicago.”
The diversity of the organizations, locations and people represented in the rally was reflected in the thousands of handmade signs, which addressed a variety of issues, ranging from LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights to the rights of health care and education workers, as well as U.S. foreign policy toward Israel and Russia.
“The basic message is that we are resisting, we are defending every community and every sector of society,” said Jorge Mujica, another member of the Central Committee of the Consejo de Resistencia en Defensa del Inmigrante. “This is not only about immigrant workers, this is about students, this is about colleges and universities, this is about the health care system. It’s about everything that is under attack by the Washington administration.”
Faith Humphrey Hill, a Chicago-based fiber artist, said she struggled with choosing only one issue to focus on when weaving her sign.
“I almost knitted a really long tapestry, like a long scarf that just drags on forever, because I don’t know how to sum up everything that upsets me,” she said. “Women’s rights is obviously close to home, but I also have a trans child, and so his (Trump’s) attack on trans people really upsets me.
“My kid exists,” she added. “He’s trying to erase them, but no, they’re a human, and they exist.”
Sonya Dymova is an undergraduate student in journalism with Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, and a fellow in its Medill Illinois News Bureau working in partnership with Capitol News Illinois.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
