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Organizers across the United States are planning a massive day of May Day protests against the Trump administration. Organizers say that they have broad support from groups targeted by the administration, including immigrants, federal workers and more. "Instead of attacking only one community … they are attacking everybody at the same time, and that enabled us to gather a really broad coalition," says Jorge Mújica, strategic organizer for Arise Chicago.
In New York, organizers are calling on people to march alongside them in Foley Square. "We need to fight this corporate takeover," says Nisha Tabassum, lead organizer for worker issues at Make the Road New York. "We are the many; they are the few."
Los Angeles organizers are expecting hundreds of thousands of protesters to join them in opposition to Trump's policies. "We are taking our power back," says Georgia Flowers Lee, National Education Association vice president for United Teachers Los Angeles.
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On Friday, FBI agents arrested a county judge in Milwaukee and charged her with obstructing justice and concealing an individual from arrest. After an undocumented immigrant, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, appeared before her in court on an unrelated misdemeanor charge, Judge Hannah Dugan learned that ICE agents were waiting in the hallway outside her courtroom to arrest him. Dugan told the agents they could not perform the arrest without a judicial warrant and adjourned the hearing, directing Flores-Ruiz to leave her courtroom into a public hallway. Milwaukee-based attorney Ann Jacobs says it appears that two DEA agents who remained in the hallway as Flores-Ruiz left did not take any action toward an arrest while he was still inside the courthouse. He was later pursued and arrested outside. One week later, FBI agents arrested Dugan, accusing her of helping Flores-Ruiz avoid arrest. "The message is crystal clear: ‘If you cross the Trump administration, we will arrest you,'" says Jacobs. "The goal is to chill judges from ruling against the Trump administration," with "the hopes that they can cudgel the judiciary into simply becoming meekly obedient to the executive branch." Dugan's longtime friend Emilio De Torre, who spoke at protests held this week at the FBI's offices in Wisconsin, says FBI Director Kash Patel's public celebration of her arrest is "absolutely disgusting and damaging," and slams the effects of Trump's attacks on civil society. "People here in Milwaukee are not taking kindly to the fact that our community, our economy, our family, now our courthouses and our schools are being disrupted by the heavy-handed overreach that we see."
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