May Day demonstrations span coast to coast in ‘50501’ anti-Trump protests

By Eric Levenson, Alaa Elassar and Stephanie Elam, CNN

(CNN) — Protests under the “50501” movement – short for 50 protests, 50 states, 1 movement – in response to the Trump administration’s controversial moves against immigrants and federal workers over its first 100 days are happening across the country Thursday.

Scores of people are taking to the streets in cities including Los Angeles, New York City and Washington, DC, for May Day – or International Workers’ Day – to protest what they call an assault on immigrants, workers and students exercising their right to free speech.

“Trump and his billionaire profiteers are trying to create a race to the bottom – on wages, on benefits, on dignity itself,” the movement’s website states. “This May Day we are fighting back. We are demanding a country that puts our families over their fortunes – public schools over private profits, healthcare over hedge funds, prosperity over free market politics.”

Causes come together in united protests

New York City’s first May Day protest on Thursday brought together several causes, with chants of “Free Palestine,” signs calling for the freedom of detained Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil and worker’s rights signs reading, “Trump: Hands Off Our Unions.”

“Trump has poor and working-class people forgetting who our enemies are,” an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation said to the large crowd gathered in New York City’s Union Square. “Our enemies are not international students that organize on their campus. Our enemies are not undocumented workers that contribute to their communities, that pay taxes and can’t get services. Our enemies are not workers that work for corporations.”

“No – this racist, sexist, anti-worker, homophobic, xenophobic, transphobic system is our enemy,” the organizer said as the crowd cheered in response.

A group of roughly 150 people marched a little over 20 blocks from Union Square to the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, where the rallies continued on its front entrance steps.

Demonstrators chanted and cheered while carrying Palestinian flags and signs that read, “People demand: Stop the deportations.” Multiple speakers spoke about the government’s targeting of immigrants and the US funding to Israel for weapons and military equipment as the civilian death toll in Gaza continues to rise.

The 50501 movement originated from a Reddit forum launched on January 25 that gave rise to a wave of nationwide protests led by grassroots organizations following Trump’s inauguration. What began as an online movement quickly spilled into the streets, with at least four major demonstrations in the past four months.

Before the May Day protests, the most recent came on April 19 when crowds of people attended over 80 protests at state capitols, courthouses and city halls in several states to oppose what organizers describe as President Donald Trump’s executive overreach, including deportations without due process, the dismantling of federal agencies and threats to higher education.

Protesters demand the return of wrongfully deported man

In downtown Los Angeles, vast numbers of people rallied and chanted in opposition to the Trump administration and what speakers described as efforts to undermine Black and immigrant communities.

“The real parasites of this country are those billionaires that are destroying this country’s institutions,” said Aquilina Soriano Versoza, the founder of the Pilipino Workers Center.

The crowd broke into multiple chants: “When I say workers, you say power! When I say immigrants, you say power! When I say union, you say yes!”

“Enough with the senseless attacks on our brothers and sisters who came to this country seeking a better life,” said Carmen Roberts, vice president of SEIU Local 2015, the largest union in California representing over half a million long-term care workers.

“Let us choose unity over division,” she said, adding “Sí, se puede,” Spanish for “Yes, it can be done,” a nod to the rallying cry of the farm workers movement led by César E. Chávez, who fought for fair wages, humane treatment and safer working conditions for California’s farm workers through nonviolent marches, boycotts and fasts.

Similar crowds made their way through the streets Washington, DC, where the wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was wrongly deported to El Salvador last month, spoke to demonstrators.

“My husband was illegally detained, abducted and disappeared, thrown away to die in one of the most dangerous prisons in El Salvador with no due process because of an error,” Jennifer Vasquez Sura said as the crowd responded with chants of “shame.”

“This pain is indescribable. My children … have been left to live in a silence of their (father’s) absence, and they miss him more than anything,” she added. “Stop playing political games with my husband’s life.”

The Trump administration has taken extraordinary measures to crack down on immigration, aggressively pressuring Immigration and Customs Enforcement to pick up the pace of migrant arrests and touting mass deportation plans. The recent crackdown has included the wrongful deportation of Abrego Garcia. On Tuesday, Trump acknowledged he could secure the return of Garcia, but refuses to do so.

Delia Catalina Ramirez, the daughter of Guatemalan immigrants, also spoke to DC protesters.

“We understand that this president wants to divide us. He wants to pit us against each other,” Ramirez said.

“But look around, friends. We are Black, we are brown, we are Asian, we are Arab, we are Muslim, we are Jewish, we are White, we are working class and we are congresspeople saying, ‘enough is enough.’”

Ramirez pointed to mobilization and actions such as the May Day protests as “the only thing that will stop fascism.”

“This is what resistance looks like,” she said. “They’re going to try their best to continue to divide us. But this is a moment where it doesn’t matter if you come from Colombia, Jamaica, Venezuela, Poland, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, Mexico. If you’re coming from Afghanistan, from Gaza, we all come together now.”

Protests continue as Trump’s approval rating drops

50501 describes itself as “decentralized” and says all its events are organized by independent volunteers. A map on its website lists over 1,000 events in communities across the country.

The protests Thursday are part of a partnership with the group May Day Strong, Gloriann Sahay, the co-founder and digital director of Political Revolution PAC, told CNN.

“We will not stand by as this administration kidnaps our neighbors, tramples our rights, jails judges, harms people in our marginalized communities, and turns the evil Project 2025 into a reality. When the government attacks even one person, they are attacking every American,” Sahay said.

May Day is often a day for protests and civil action for labor rights, but most Americans do not have the day off of work, and planning a protest for the middle of the workweek is a tricky proposition for mass attendance.

“Despite it being a weekday, we still expect a large turnout because the American people are committed to defending the rights of their communities,” Sahay said. “On May 1st, we’re gonna step up to bat for our communities and our unions, because we know they would do the same for us.”

The protests come two days after Trump marked 100 days in office. In that short period, he has moved to upend the world order by instituting tariffs that threaten global trade; dismantling the administrative state under the Department of Government Efficiency’s slapdash cuts; rolling back protections for transgender people; and exercising executive power with disdain for checks and balances.

Trump’s 41% approval rating is the lowest for any newly elected president at 100 days dating back at least to Dwight Eisenhower over six decades ago – including Trump’s own first term, according to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS. Approval of Trump’s handling of the presidency is down 4 points since March, and 7 points lower than it was in late February. Just 22% say they strongly approve of Trump’s handling of the job, a new low, and about twice as many say they strongly disapprove (45%).

The first Trump presidency was met with immediate mass protests in the form of the Women’s March on the day after the inauguration in January 2017. The second time around, protests were slower to develop on a significant scale until more recently.

The “Hands Off” protests on Saturday, April 5, targeted both Trump and billionaire Elon Musk in response to what the organizers called a “hostile takeover” and attack on American rights and freedoms. The organizers said they had three demands: “an end to the billionaire takeover and rampant corruption of the Trump administration; an end to slashing federal funds for Medicaid, Social Security, and other programs working people rely on; and an end to the attacks on immigrants, trans people, and other communities.”

Nearly 600,000 people had signed up to attend the events, some of which took place in major cities like London and Paris, according to Indivisible, one of the organizations leading the movement. In Washington DC, several Democratic members of Congress, including Democratic Reps. Jamie Raskin, Ilhan Omar and Maxwell Frost, spoke to the crowds to criticize the Trump administration.

Then on Saturday, April 19, the “50501” protests gathered across the US in a similar show of disapproval for the Trump presidency’s actions, with one of they key concerns of that protest the plight of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man wrongfully deported to an El Salvador prison.

Hundreds of “Tesla Takedown” demonstrations, also part of the wider movement against the Trump administration’s actions, have also taken place in the US, Canada and Europe as activists ramp up their opposition to CEO Elon Musk’s efforts to slash federal government staffing and budgets through DOGE.

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CNN’s Omar Jimenez, Kristin Chapman, Shania Shelton and Mina Allen contributed to this report.