On early afternoon Saturday at Lou Gehrig Plaza in the South Bronx, hundreds of residents packed the plaza for the borough’s No Kings rally, bundled up against the cold, homemade signs held high. “No Crown for the Clown,” read one. “No War, No ICE, No Kings,” read another.
A third, held by a woman near the front: “Thank You Minneapolis for Your Courage.”
According to the No Kings Coalition, more than 8 million people turned out nationwide, which they called the largest single-day protest in American history. In the Bronx, the rally was organized by a coalition of seven local groups including Northwest Bronx Indivisible, Working Families Power and Bend the Arc.
The demonstrations were a response to what organizers describe as the consolidation of executive power, the weaponization of ICE and deep cuts to Social Security, Medicaid and public education. In the Bronx, ICE activity has rattled neighborhoods across the borough for months and parents have told elected officials they are afraid to send their kids to school.
Before the elected officials took the stage, the Bronx Singing Resistance choir led the crowd in song. “Oye mi gente traimos,” they sang, voices in unison, “rise up my people, my eagle, my condors, no human beings will be illegal.”
Later came a civil rights standard reworded for the moment: “Ain’t gonna let no fascism turn me around.” People who had been standing quietly with their signs began to sway.
Between songs, the plaza erupted into call and response. “Whose democracy?” someone called out. “Our democracy!” the crowd roared back.
Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson opened the protest by naming the case of Dylan Contreras, a young Bronx resident who had spent 10 months in ICE custody before being released weeks earlier. “We reject ICE terrorizing our neighborhoods, disrupting our families and snatching children out of schools,” she said.
City Councilmember Pierina Sanchez, whose district is over 98% people of color, was more blunt. “ICE is not coming,” she told the plaza. “ICE is here today.”
The fear is concrete for many residents in the crowd. Becky Green, a Pelham Bay resident, described a coworker who had his legal immigration status revoked by executive order, showed up as required to an immigration hearing and was detained. He is now held in Louisiana, far from his family.
“It makes me sick that they think this is what they can do,” Green said. Asked whether rallying would lead to change, she paused. “I don’t know. Who knows? But what’s the alternative?”
For the community organizers who took the stage, the protest was a way to speak out against a federal administration that has undermined their work in the community. Leslie Vasquez, an environmental justice organizer with The Point, has spent years fighting for cleaner air in a borough with some of the highest asthma rates in the city.
She sees the current federal administration as a direct threat to that work. “The Bronx is sick and tired of being sick and tired,” Vasquez told the crowd. “We refuse to let them spend our tax dollars on things that will continue to negatively impact our community.”
Edwin Santana of the Freedom Agenda, which organizes around mass incarceration and has fought to keep ICE out of Rikers Island, contrasted between how the justice system treats the powerful and how it treats everyone else in an interview with the Bronx Times.
“Trump has been accused of many crimes and has not settled any of them,” Santana said. “But if it was me, or the Black and brown person here in the city, we would have definitely landed on Rikers Island.”
Assemblymember Emerita Torres, a former U.S. diplomat who served at the United Nations, criticized Trump’s foreign policy’s impact on the Bronx. “When we slap tariffs on allies, prices go up here in the Bronx, at the grocery store, at the gas station,” she said to a roaring crowd. “Trade policy has been treated like a reality show with Donald Trump, not a strategy for our economy.”
The coalition pledged to keep mobilizing through what one organizer called “the next 2 years and 9 months of the administration.”
For Green, still working to get her coworker released from detention in Louisiana, the question of whether any of it would matter was beside the point. “It feels overwhelming. It feels like you’re alone,” she said. “But you’re not. And I’d rather be doing this than nothing.”
Carol Chen is a student at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. For more coverage, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram!
