Carrying signs and demanding an end to immigration raids, thousands of protesters descended on downtown Los Angeles on Saturday to march in support of immigrant rights.
Crowds of protesters taking part in an event billed as the Free the People immigration march gathered at 11 a.m. at Pershing Square, then made their way to Los Angeles City Hall, by way of Broadway, with people filling the streets several blocks at a time, eventually gathering on the steps of City Hall and in Grand Park.
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Miguel Mendez, 15, carried his younger brother, who waved an American flag, on his shoulder as he marched down Broadway.
“I have an illegal father,” Mendez said. “My biggest fear is for my little brother to grow up without a dad, for him not to experience what I experienced, growing up with my dad.”
Mendez said his father, now 40 years old, “crossed through the desert” from Mexico with his grandmother as a 5-year-old.
The family depends on the father, who runs a demolition business, to be one of the breadwinners, along with his mother, a paralegal, he said.
The recent news of raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents has been on the forefront of his mind, he added.
“I start overthinking,” he said. “I get sad, and it scares me.”
Jessica Ortiz, 37, of Riverside says she is supporting sanctuary for undocumented immigrants because “my parents migrated here. I’ve seen them work hard and make their way up. This is my way of paying back and contributing to their cause.”
Ortiz is a government employee who works in the welfare office and says, “I know for a fact that illegal immigrants aren’t on welfare. They don’t qualify for benefits.
“It bothers me that part of the argument against immigrants is that they’re taking our resources, … but they really aren’t.”
Organizers of the march also were demanding that local leaders officially designate Los Angeles a “sanctuary city” and issued a declaration that read, “Many local elected officials have demonstrated a lack of urgency while riding the wave of the mass anti-Trump movement. Some have tossed around the term ‘sanctuary’ without working towards meaningful sanctuary policies to protect and promote the welfare of the people of Los Angeles. Some others (notably, Mayor Garcetti) have been buckling to Trump’s empty threats to defund sanctuary cities.”
Henry Willis called on Garcetti to “step up.”
“He’s running away from the problem,” the 64-year-old labor attorney said. “That’s not a profile in courage.”
His wife, Debbie, 64, a graphic designer, added that “the immigrants need to hear it from him (Garcetti), that he’s got their backs.”
“I don’t know who it is he’s trying to placate by not saying that we’re a sanctuary city, but everybody believes we are anyway — he might as well say it,” she said.
The gathering was organized in protest of President Donald Trump, who has vowed to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.
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Shortly after taking office, Trump moved forward on his campaign promises by signing two sweeping executive orders on immigration, which called for building a border wall, cutting federal funding to sanctuary cities that protect undocumented immigrants, and banning entry into the U.S. of people from seven Muslim-majority countries.
Saturday’s march followed an ICE operation earlier this month that resulted in 161 arrests in six Southern California counties.
The arrests were part of a nationwide effort to deport criminals who are in the country illegally. Immigration activists have said the sweeps were part of the Trump administration’s hard-line stance on undocumented immigrants, though ICE officials denied it.
On Monday, protesters are expected to take part in another anti-Trump march called the Not My President’s Day rally.
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