It’s been over a month since Donald Trump took power, after running a campaign soaked in anti-immigrant tirades and threats of mass deportation. The media have concentrated on these threats, but even progressive outlets paid little attention to the responses of the communities threatened. Yet marches and demonstrations have been widespread in Mexican communities.
These protests often take place not in urban centers, which typically receive more media attention, but in the Mexican barrios of the urban fringe. San Mateo is one — on the San Francisco Peninsula south of the city. Fort Bragg is another — a former mill and fishing town three hours north of San Francisco, where Mexican children are a majority in the small city’s schools.
These are not the polite petitions of victims pleading for a softer repression. They are angry protests — people are out in the streets, not cowering behind closed doors. They carry signs with denunciations that declare “MAGA: Mexicans Ain’t Going Anywhere!” or “I drink my horchata warm because Fuck ICE!”
Young Mexican women — some born here, some who came as children, and others who just arrived — carry U.S. flags, not out of false patriotism, but demanding recognition as an essential part of the nation, belonging to this country’s fabric. The many, many Mexican flags have important meaning. They speak of pride in Mexico as a country with a progressive government, in contrast to our reactionary one. They demand that the Mexican presence in this country be recognized as well, with rights and respect for Mexican people.
Not all the flags are Mexican or U.S., Hondurans carry their own, as do Salvadorans and Guatemalans. Some marchers wave the Philippines’ flag with a similar message — recognition for a community with centuries of history, going back to the imperial war that made their homeland a U.S. colony and beyond.
These marches with their flags and signs are harbingers of change. They’re not yet as large as the protests that took place in 2006, with its millions in the streets. But they are growing. They are overwhelmingly organized and led by young people and women, and they deserve recognition.
The benefit of organized resistance goes beyond fighting immigration raids. The movements of immigrant workers, their families and their communities have historically fought for deeper social change, beyond deportation defense. They’ve shown great persistence and strategic vision, as they fought threats of deportation while imagining a future of greater equality, working-class rights and social solidarity. That vision is as necessary to defeating repression as action in the streets.
In the flow of people crossing the border, “we see our families and coworkers, while this system only sees money,” says Rene Saucedo, an organizer for the Northern California Coalition for Just Immigration Reform, a grassroots immigrant rights organization that has organized marches and demonstrations supporting the Registry Bill. “So we have to fight for what we really need, and not just what we don’t want.” Marchers carried signs promoting an alternative to deportation, the Registry Bill, HR 1511. This proposal would open legal status to an estimated 8 million people by allowing undocumented immigrants to apply for legal permanent residence. Some of the anti-deportation marchers were veterans of earlier marches last year and the year before, demanding the passage of this bill.
Stepping out is the precondition for mobilizing the support of a broader progressive community behind these protests. The photographs here can’t possibly encompass all the marches or show every aspect of them. Their purpose is to make visible the crucial role of the Mexican community in inspiring a fightback to Trump fascism across the board. They show who’s out there organizing and leading it. Their picket signs and flags graphically present their demands.
Because the new Trump regime is seizing databases previously not under federal control, and has sophisticated tools to track those it targets, there are no individual captions for these photographs and no naming of the individuals in them. They were taken in February 2025 in San Mateo and Fort Bragg, California.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
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Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
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