Over 1,000 people in downtown Tacoma protest a year of Trump in office
This week marked one year since Donald Trump began his second presidential term.
And this Saturday, more than 1,000 people braved the cold and took to the grassy knolls of Fireman’s Park in downtown Tacoma to protest against it.
Protestors of all ages packed into the park’s confines in the early afternoon sun for the “One Year of Tacoma Resisting Trump” rally and march. The event was a collaborative effort of 25 organizations, including the Climate Alliance of the South Sound, the Tacoma Democratic Socialists of America, Jewish Voice for Peace and Indivisible Tacoma, according to a poster for the event.
Claudia Cabellon, one of the emcees leading chants at the rally, has seen the impacts of ICE firsthand.
Besides their role as a member of Malaya Tacoma, a chapter of the national Filipino coalition Malaya Movement, they work in education. One of the parents of a student they work with was taken by ICE agents during winter break, they said.
“It’s impacting all of us,” Cabellon said. “It’s happening in Minneapolis and right here in Tacoma. We’re all fighting the same issue.”
Also emceeing the event was 14-year-old Negev Belnaker. His work organizing is partly motivated by his family’s history, he said. As a Jewish person, he lost many of his ancestors to the Holocaust.
“They died from fascism,” Belnaker said. “And I feel like I have a moral duty to prevent it from happening again.”
He also attended the rally to represent the younger generation, who are subject to oppressive rules but aren’t old enough to vote against it yet, he said.
“I don’t really see that many kids out here protesting,” he said. “I’m seeing a few here, but not nearly as much as I think there should be.”
Joyce Brannon and Judy Beylerian, two seniors who attended the No Kings protest last summer, also echoed Belnaker’s urge for more young people to protest.
The two women were already planning on attending the protest, but when they saw news of another fatal ICE shooting in Minnesota this morning, they felt they had no choice.
“I can’t believe this country,” Beylerian said. “Every aspect of the federal government is rotten.”
Just hours before the rally commenced, ICE agents fatally shot a protestor in Minneapolis, marking the second death at the hands of federal agents this month.
Carly Keaveny, a woman from Gig Harbor attending the rally with her family, also said the actions of ICE in Minneapolis drove her to protest.
“ICE is completely out of control,” Keaveny said “It’s devastating, specifically the way people are dying in ICE custody.”
Even though she’s been in a “constant state of horror” since the administration began, seeing the amount of people who showed up to Saturday’s event gave her hope.
“It brings a lot of sense of community,” she said. “We can come together, even though we come from different places. We are not all the same race or religion, but we can all agree on something.”
