Resistance breeds solidarity: A report from Chicago

“No Kings” protests drew roughly 7 million people in 2,700 local rallies across the U.S. on October 18, in what was perhaps the largest number of protesters at a single event in U.S. history—surpassing even the Women’s Marches of 2017. Moreover, the age skewed younger, while the crowd was more multiracial than the first No Kings Day (although still far short of representing the U.S.’s Black and Brown populations).

The huge turnout shows the degree to which popular opinion has shifted dramatically against Trump—since experiencing the reality of his immigration witch hunt, especially in cities where ICE and other federal agents are currently terrorizing migrant communities. In Chicago, for example, where ICE and Customs and Border Patrol goons have been roaming the streets, indiscriminately beating up (and occasionally shooting) people with Latino features, the numbers on October 18 topped 100,000—in a march that stretched 2 miles through the city center.

Chicago has certainly felt like a war zone since September 9, when ICE’s so called “Midway Blitz” began. Overnight on September 30, in just one example, 300 federal agents dropped from Black Hawk helicopters and unmarked vans onto an apartment building in the mainly Black residential area of South Shore—smashing in windows, breaking down doors, and zip-tying all the residents as they awoke, and in the process arresting dozens of U.S. citizens for the hours-long duration of the raid.

It turns out that people generally don’t approve of armed government thugs menacing their neighbors. This was the uniting theme of the protests, along with opposition to creeping fascism. Official march signs such as “Abolish ICE” and “Hands Off Chicago” signs were accompanied by chants, including “Immigrants are welcome here,” and “No one is illegal.”

Donald Trump’s response to this massive outpouring appeared on Truth Social that night: an AI-generated video of Trump wearing a crown and piloting a “King Trump” fighter jet that dumped massive amounts of a brown liquid strongly resembling excrement over a crowd of protesters in New York City’s Times Square. [That’s one for the history books.]

Even before the No Kings marches happened, MAGA Republicans had labeled the protesters as supporters of “terrorism”. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, for example, declared, “The Democrat Party’s main constituency is made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.”

The day before the rallies, House Speaker Mike Johnson stated, “We refer to it by its more accurate description: The Hate America Rally. You’re gonna bring together the Marxists, the socialists, the antifa advocates, the anarchists, and the pro-Hamas wing of the far-left Democrat Party. That is the modern Democratic Party.”

But instead of hate, the protests imparted an overpoweringly elated atmosphere—partly because the turnouts were so large—and a great deal of humor, based on the homemade signs that many people carried, with slogans like “Don’t panic, we’re just Hispanic!” Some demonstrators wore costumes, while others carried signs of Trump with a Hitler mustache, or a in variety of unbecoming poses.

The demonstrations drew large numbers of people who had never attended a protest before, but also many who have already joined one of the “Rapid Response Networks” that have been organized by immigrants’ rights activists, neighborhood by neighborhood, across the city and suburbs.

These neighborhood-based networks have been around as long as ICE, but they have mushroomed since Trump took office in January—to serve the many needs of the fearful migrant population. People volunteer to help distribute copies of “Know your rights” brochures in immigrant communities. They set up phone and internet hotlines to notify the network of a suspected ICE sighting; once they have verified it, they then broadcast it to the entire neighborhood. They also hand out whistle kits to everyone in the neighborhood, along with the different types of signals to use when ICE has been spotted in the area verses when ICE is attacking someone in the immediate vicinity. Those driving cars beep their horns if they see ICE goons in the area.

Many migrants are too afraid to leave their homes to go grocery shopping, or to bring their children to school, so the network assigns volunteers to individual families to go and buy groceries, accompany their kids, and help with the other basic necessities of life.

The people who filled streets across the country on October 18 were those described above—many new to activism, urgently motivated by the authoritarianism rapidly descending on U.S. society.

No Kings’ primary organizer is the Indivisible coalition, whose aim is to draw in the broadest possible participation by emphasizing unity, patriotism and nonviolence. There is no question that not only the size, but also the sense of solidarity that dominated the protests were hugely successful.

But Indivisible also makes no secret of its ties to the Democratic Party, and Democratic politicians featured prominently as speakers on October 18. In Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson and Gov. J.B. Pritzker took the stage, Sen. D.C., Sen. Elizabeth Warren in Boston, Sen. Chuck Schumer in New York, etc. Sen. Bernie Sanders, although technically an independent but caucuses with the Democrats, spoke in Washington, D.C.

Indivisible’s ties to the Democrats also prevents them from championing Palestinian liberation because of the party’s unyielding support for Israel, including during the Palestinian genocide of the last two years. No Kings’ organizers were silent on Palestine. For this reason, No Kings featured a host of American flags but very few Palestinian flags.

Moreover, at a time when the Democratic Party is nearly as unpopular as the Republicans, Indivisible gave no voice to this growing sentiment, instead urging protesters to “vote” (for Democrats) in the next election as its only call to action.

We can only wonder how many from this throng of protesters might be open to building a left-wing alternative to the Democrats because there was none visibly on offer.

The potential of this rising protest movement—including not only the mass demonstrations but also the grassroots activism that is laying the basis for long-term organizing—can easily be smothered by the limitations imposed by the Democratic Party. This is how the Democrats earned their reputation as “the graveyard of social movements” over the last century.

The last five decades of U.S. politics has been dominated by neoliberalism—a ruling-class project to transfer wealth from the working class to the corporate class—and supported by both Democrats and Republicans throughout. That project’s success ultimately propelled Trump into office. In that long neoliberal era, an organized left independent from the Democrats was eventually all but destroyed.

The road ahead is a long one, but the choice we face is to fight or surrender to authoritarianism.

And the number of people becoming radicalized by Trump’s presidency shows that the human material exists to build the kind of movements we need to effect transformative change, based on the politics of solidarity and internationalism.