Activists march for immigrant rights in Wisconsin: ‘We’re making this country strong’

Led by a mariachi band, hundreds of demonstrators on Wednesday morning marched across Milwaukee to the Fiserv Forum – the home of the Milwaukee Bucks and, in July, the venue of the Republican national convention.

The rally, organized by the immigrant and workers’ rights group Voces de la Frontera, is an annual event, but in 2024 it holds particular weight. The focus of the rally extended beyond immigration, to fear of authoritarianism under Republican candidate Donald Trump and critique of Joe Biden’s handling of the US role in Israel and Gaza.

This year, May Day also fell on the same day as a Trump campaign event in Waukesha, which organizers seized on to denounce Trump’s immigration policy and call on Biden to use his executive authority to adopt protections for undocumented workers.

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“We reject [Trump’s] political platform, which promises dictatorship, deportations and separation of families,” Voces de la Frontera executive director Christine Neumann-Ortiz told the crowd Wednesday, to applause.

As the 2024 presidential campaign season ramps up, Trump has increasingly stoked anti-immigrant sentiment, railing on anecdotal examples of what he calls “migrant crime” and casting the Biden administration’s border policy as insufficiently harsh. In an interview with Time magazine published 30 April, Trump proposed mass deportations, facilitated in part by the US military, during his possible second term in office and claimed that undocumented immigrants are not civilians.

For Omar Flores, the co-chair of the Coalition to March on the RNC, the Wednesday rally was an occasion to draw attention to the RNC on 15 July.

“A sense that people are getting in Milwaukee is that they’re a little afraid of the RNC coming here,” said Flores, who grew up in Kenosha and said he worries about political repression and rightwing vigilante violence under a second Trump term. “I know it’s scary, but we still have to march.”

The Republican party has pushed for the Secret Service to move protesters away from the arena in July, and Flores said the Coalition to March on the RNC is working with the American Civil Liberties Union to ensure access.

As the Republican party seizes on immigration and the border to rally support before the 2024 elections, Biden has also shifted to the right on the issue, endorsing a measure to restrict asylum-seeking and referring to an immigrant as the pejorative “illegal” during his State of the Union address. Speakers at the event offered different perspectives on how to respond to Biden’s posture on immigration and Israel’s offensive in Gaza, which Voces de la Frontera has repeatedly denounced as a “genocide”.

Dr Roa Qato, a Palestinian-American OB-GYN with a practice in Milwaukee and a featured speaker at the rally said she would rather vote third party than for Biden. “It sends the message that if you don’t listen to us, we’re following through – we’re not voting for you, your empty promises are not going to work,” she said.

Neumann-Ortiz said Voces de la Frontera’s political arm, which endorsed the “uninstructed” protest vote in Wisconsin’s presidential primary and forms the largest Latino voter network in the swing state, will nonetheless support Biden.

“[Trump] is someone who tried to legally and through violent action undermine a democratic election, and this is someone who will follow through with their threats on mass military deportation,” said Neumann-Ortiz.

“I think we’re just being very clear with President Biden and his advisers, that we can do what we can do, but if you are not listening, and you don’t take seriously the opposition that is coming from the Palestinian rights movement, from the immigrant rights movement … you’re gonna lose.”

For other attendees, the May Day rally offered an opportunity to remind politicians and the broader Wisconsin community about the contributions of immigrants to their home state – documented or not.

Sonia Torres, a machine operator at a furniture manufacturing company in De Pere, said that with the help of Voces de la Frontera organizers, she was able to receive temporary protected status amid a workplace dispute.

“I want people to realize that we have rights,” said Torres in Spanish. “Companies only view us as a part of the budget, as a means of making money – but we need to realize we have rights.”

In recent months, commentators and politicians on the right have seized on the town of Whitewater, Wisconsin, which has seen a recent influx of immigrants, to stoke anxieties about immigration. Whitewater officials have asked for federal resources to accommodate the influx of an estimated 800-1,000 new residents in the last two years but have rejected politicization of their shifting population.

“Señor Donald Trump, listen, this message is just for you,” Jorge Islas-Martinez, an interpreter and bilingual educator from Whitewater told the crowd.

“We are not the people that you think that we are. We are here to work and we’re changing and making this [country] strong.”