Millions more march this weekend against the Trump agenda

WASHINGTON—More than 800 rallies nationwide, aimed at defeating the Trump agenda, including three within Washington D.C., drew at least three million people on April 19. The mobilizations against the president’s agenda focused sharply on saving democracy, Social Security, and health care.

The demonstrators made it clear that they are not waiting for the 2026 or 2028 elections to make their point. And they made it clear that they are not counting on those Democratic Party leaders they feel are not out there strongly enough in the fight for their issues. They were particularly pointed in their calling out of the administration for its ignoring of court orders and for essentially plunging the nation into a constitutional crisis resulting from its unprecedented lawlessness.

Adding to the dramatic protests is the opening today of a “Muskville” encampment of federal workers dispossessed by the administration’s slashing of government jobs. The encampment, in Columbus Circle here, is reminiscent of the “Hoovervilles” that sprang up across the nation as the Great Depression of the 1930s deepened.

“Uphold the Constitution or ICE will come for you next,” one D.C. sign warned. “No Kings,” many signs read.

50501, the grass-roots movement that first organized the marches, pulled no punches in its pre-march statement.

“Donald Trump has defied a direct, binding order from the United States Supreme Court,” 50501 declared. “Let that sink in. This is not a theoretical crisis. This is not an abstract fear. This is the moment that confirms our Constitution has been crippled.

“The Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to secure the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father and Sheet Metal Worker who fled gang violence in El Salvador and was granted protection by a federal judge in the United States. Instead, Trump ignored the court, unlawfully deported Garcia, and abandoned him to one of El Salvador’s most dangerous prisons.

“Now, Trump is refusing to comply with the highest court in the land. That is a crime. That is an act of tyranny.”

Trump’s ICE agents hauled Garcia, a Laurel, Md., resident and a member of Sheet Metal Workers Local 100, out of his car, cuffed him—though he was non-resisting—threw him in a van, and later put him on a one-way plane trip to a notorious prison in El Salvador, whose president is a pro-Trump dictator.

A federal judge ordered the plane turned around, and the U.S. Supreme Court, 9-0, said Garcia should be returned to the U.S. to face due process about his citizenship. Trump, using lies, said Garcia was a gang member. Trump also defied both courts.

Garcia’s fate was a key theme of all the protests, especially since Trump later claimed that he was looking to Attorney General Pam Bondi to find laws that would greenlight his right to kidnap and deport U.S. citizens, too.

Several marches in D.C.

The first D.C. protest was in Lafayette Square in front of the White House, with the second at the Washington Monument, with its members later marching to the White House. The first march drew more than a thousand people, and the second drew at least ten times that. The third attracted about two dozen people to a narrow strip of grass outside the metal fence surrounding Vice President J.D. Vance’s house at the former Naval Observatory high above the city.

The AFL-CIO formally endorsed these marches, but sent no delegation to the D.C. ones. Its Tweet concentrated on Trump’s and Elon Musk’s trashing of federal workers and programs, done to fund their $4.5 trillion tax cut for corporations and the rich.

“America’s unions and working people will not accept cuts to our essential services like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security just so billionaires can get even more tax breaks. We should be expanding essential services, not gutting them,” the federation posted on BlueSky, its new social media platform, replacing Twitter/X. Musk owns Twitter/X.

Besides Trump’s defiance of court orders, marchers were particularly angry about his executive orders against freedom of speech, his illegal deportations of undocumented people, and his plans to deport U.S. citizens, too, all without a hearing or due process.

They also protested Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts to programs people depend upon, everything from air safety to food safety to combating global warming to Medicare to Social Security.

And speakers in Lafayette Park and at the Washington Monument also pulled no punches against the corporate class, whose campaign cash funds Trump and his Republican Party toadies.

Chants demanded that Trump return Mahmoud Khalil, whom ICE agents kidnapped. Khalil is now being held in a prison in Louisiana.

“Kidnapping is not foreign policy,” one D.C. sign responded. A marcher in Manhattan compared ICE’s tactics against migrants to those of infamous—and CIA-backed—Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Newsweek reported. Pinochet’s extra-judicial kidnappings and killings saw thousands “disappear.”

Trump blames undocumented immigrants, “gang members”—he charged, with fake “proof,” that Garcia was an MS-13 gang member in New York—minorities, transgender people, and disabled people for everything from rising inflation to violent crime, one Lafayette Park speaker said.

“Billionaires like Donald Trump and Elon Musk want us to believe immigrants are the problem. That’s a lie,” a woman immigration lawyer told the Lafayette Park crowd. “They’re here fleeing conditions that were caused” in their home nations of Latin America “by American imperialism.

“He’s revoked rights from a million people,” she added, referring to the federal workers whom Trump and Musk have either fired or stripped of their union contracts. “He’s used ICE to kidnap members of our community and to send them to a foreign prison.

Want people to feel hopeless

“They want you to feel hopeless,” she declared. But the size and the fury of the demonstrators are the community’s answer. “People are standing up. They”—the corporate class—“hate it when you stand up for your rights.”

Said another demonstrator: “The true power of society lies not here in the White House or Congress, but here in the streets. We need to look at the present threat of fascism, just as there were threats against the labor movement in the 1930s and the elimination of Jim Crow” in the 1950s and 1960s.

As might be expected, hand-made signs were personally poignant. One united Trump with Musk, who also owns Tesla, the electric vehicle maker. Its stock price, sales, and profits have taken a beating since Trump’s inauguration and Musk’s ascent to power, prominence, and controversy.

“Grab him by the Teslacles” one D.C. sign said, with the “Tesla” in red. The reference was the flip side of an infamous Trump misogynist statement to an Access Hollywood host, which surfaced during his 2016 presidential campaign. Trump boasted of grabbing women inappropriately

Another. sign declared “The Tesla guy’s a Nazi.”

New Yorkers shut down Fifth Avenue with their march. One sign there read “Musk-DOGE kidnapped our liberty.” A red swastika replaced the “s” in Musk, and a photo of the Statue of Liberty replaced the “i” in liberty.

“The Department of Justice should be more than JUST ICE,” said another D.C. sign, with the words surrounded by red and blue stars. ICE used to be in the Justice Department. It’s now in the Republican-named Department of Homeland Security. The “homeland” characterization is common in dictatorships that make imperial claims on lands outside their borders.

Besides the many signs demanding Trump’s ouster now, one added his platform, aka Project 2025, crafted for him by the hard-right extremist Heritage Foundation: “Project 2025 is TREASON,” it read.

San Francisco marchers gathered at Ocean Beach in a large circle, spelling out inside of it “Impeach + Remove.”

“Patriots stand up to tyrants,” declared a large sign, with figures of men and women preparing for the Battles of Lexington and Concord, which were the first clashes in the American Revolution. That protest drew hundreds, including Revolutionary War re-enactors, to the sites of the Concord battle. Both occurred exactly 250 years before, on April 19, 1775.

Boston resident George Bryant, at the Concord event, told the Associated Press that Trump is creating a “police state” in America as he held up a sign saying, “Trump fascist regime must go now!” “He’s defying the courts. He’s kidnapping students. He’s eviscerating the checks and balances,” Bryant said. “This is fascism.”

A march down LaSalle Street in Chicago’s Loop was led by people carrying a large poster with an American eagle and the words “Hate has no home here,” and a bedsheet banner with “50501” superimposed on Chicago’s city flag.