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Led by a mariachi band, hundreds of demonstrators marched through Milwaukee Wednesday morning to the Fiserv Forum, home of the Milwaukee Bucks and, in July, the site of the Republican National Convention.
The rally, organized by the immigrant and workers’ rights group Voces de la Frontera, is an annual event, but in 2024 it carries particular weight. The rally’s focus expanded beyond immigration to fears of authoritarianism under the Republican nominee Donald Trump and criticism of President Joe Biden’s handling of the US role in Israel and Gaza.
This year, May Day also fell on the same day as a Donald Trump campaign event in Waukesha, which organizers used to denounce Trump’s immigration policies and call on Biden to use his executive power to pass protections for undocumented workers.
“We reject [Trump’s] a political platform that promises dictatorship, deportations and the separation of families,” Voces de la Frontera executive director Christine Neumann-Ortiz told a cheering crowd Wednesday.
As the 2024 presidential campaign season approaches, Trump has increasingly stoked anti-immigrant sentiment, decrying anecdotal examples of what he calls “immigrant crime” and casting the Biden administration’s border policies as insufficiently tough. In an interview with Time magazine published on April 30, Trump proposed mass deportations, facilitated in part by the US military, during his eventual second term in office and said that undocumented immigrants are not civilians.
For Omar Flores, the co-chair of the RNC March Coalition, Wednesday’s rally was an opportunity to draw attention to the RNC on July 15.
“The sense that people are getting in Milwaukee is that they’re a little afraid of the RNC coming here,” said Flores, who grew up in Kenosha and said he worries about political repression and right-wing vigilante violence during the second term of Trump. “I know it’s scary, but we still have to march.
The GOP pushed for the Secret Service to move protesters away from the arena in July, and Flores said the RNC March Coalition is working with the American Civil Liberties Union to secure access.
As the Republican Party seizes on immigration and border policy to rally support ahead of the 2024 election, Biden has also shifted to the right on the issue, endorsing a measure to limit asylum seekers and pejoratively calling immigrants “illegal” during his State of the Union address. the state of the union. Speakers at the event offered different perspectives on how to respond to Biden’s stance on immigration and Israel’s offensive in Gaza, which Voces de la Frontera has repeatedly denounced as “genocide.”
Dr. Roa Kato, a Palestinian-American obstetrician-gynecologist with a practice in Milwaukee and speaker at the rally, said she would rather vote for a third party than for Biden.
“It sends the message that if you don’t listen to us, we’re following – we won’t vote for you, your empty promises won’t work,” Kato said.
Neumann-Ortiz said the political arm of Voces de la Frontera, which supported “uninstructed” protest voting in Wisconsin’s presidential primary and forms the largest network of Latino voters in the swing state, would nevertheless support Biden in 2024.
“[Trump] is someone who has tried legally and by violent means to undermine democratic elections, and this is someone who will follow through on his threats of mass military deportation,” Neumann-Ortiz said.
“I think we’ve just been very clear with President Biden and his advisers that we can do what we can, but if you don’t listen and take seriously the opposition that’s coming from the Palestinian rights movement, from the immigrant rights movement … you’re going to the losses.”
For others in attendance, the May Day rally offered an opportunity to remind politicians and the broader Wisconsin community of the contributions immigrants make to their home state — documented or not.
Sonia Torres, a machine operator at a furniture manufacturing company in De Pere, Wisconsin, said that with the help of Voces de la Frontera organizers, she was able to obtain temporary protected status amid a workplace dispute.
“I want people to realize that we have rights,” Torres said in Spanish. “Companies only see us as part of the budget, as a means of making money – but we have to realize that we have rights.”
In recent months, commentators and politicians on the right have done so captured the town of Whitewater, Wisconsin, which has recently seen an influx of immigrants to fuel concerns about immigration. Whitewater officials have requested federal resources to accommodate an influx of about 800-1,000 new residents over the past two years, but have rejected politicizing the changing population.
“Sen. Donald Trump, listen, this message is just for you,” Jorge Islas-Martinez, a translator and bilingual educator from Whitewater, told the crowd.
“We are not the people you think we are. We are here to work and change and that is what we are doing [country] strong.”
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