Thousands March Across the Country for Immigrant Rights

Hundreds of thousands of people marched in cities across the United States on May Day, in the largest coordinated immigrant rights mobilization the country has seen since 2006 — driven not just by the annual tradition of May 1 organizing, but by outrage over a new Arizona law that has become a lightning rod for the entire immigrant rights movement.

A Law That Changed the Scale of the Marches

The marches had been in the works for months, part of the now-established tradition of May Day immigrant rights organizing that dates back to the massive 2006 mobilizations against the Sensenbrenner bill. But Arizona Governor Jan Brewer’s decision to sign SB 1070 into law on April 23 — just over a week before this year’s marches — transformed what organizers expected to be a solid but modest turnout into something considerably larger. The law makes it a state crime to be in Arizona without immigration documentation and requires police to determine a person’s immigration status whenever they have “reasonable suspicion” the person may be undocumented, a provision critics say amounts to legally sanctioned racial profiling of Latino residents regardless of their actual immigration status.

New York labor organizer John Delgado captured the mood with a pointed jab at the law’s author: “I want to thank the governor of Arizona because she’s awakened a sleeping giant.”

City by City, a Show of Force

The marches stretched across the country in numbers organizers hadn’t seen in years. In Los Angeles, organizers described a “massive and historic” turnout, with Full Rights for Immigrants Coalition leader Juan Jose Gutierrez telling the crowd, “Our struggle will not end until we win full legalization.” In New York City, more than 5,000 people rallied in Union Square before marching down Broadway to Foley Square. San Francisco saw 6,000 people rally at 24th Street and Mission before marching to Civic Center, part of a broader wave of Northern California actions spanning at least ten cities and towns, from Santa Cruz and Watsonville to Sacramento and Fresno. Seattle drew a crowd approaching 10,000, chanting “Boycott Arizona!” and “Sí se puede!” through downtown streets, while several thousand more rallied in rural Yakima, in eastern Washington.

Boston and Washington, D.C. also saw major demonstrations, and smaller vigils and rallies took place in cities and towns far removed from the traditional immigrant-rights strongholds — a sign organizers pointed to as evidence the Arizona law had struck a nerve well beyond the border states and major immigrant-gateway cities most directly affected by it.

A Preview of the Reckoning Still to Come in Arizona Itself

The May 1 marches also served as a warm-up for an even larger mobilization organizers were already planning specifically inside Arizona: a march on Phoenix scheduled for later that month, timed for the law’s actual implementation date, that would go on to draw well over 100,000 people from across the country — supporters traveling to Arizona specifically because, as one popular slogan put it, “Todos somos Arizona”: we are all Arizona.

Demands Beyond a Single State Law

While SB 1070 gave this year’s marches their most immediate rallying point, organizers were careful to frame the demonstrations around demands that extended well beyond a single Arizona statute: full legalization and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already living and working in the country, an end to workplace raids and the E-Verify enforcement program, and pressure on the Obama administration to make good on repeated acknowledgments that the broader immigration system was, in the president’s own characterization, fundamentally broken.

For many marchers, the significance of the turnout wasn’t simply about defeating one law in one state — it was about demonstrating, at a scale organizers hadn’t managed to produce in the several years since 2006, that the political coalition capable of forcing federal immigration reform onto the national agenda was still very much intact, and ready to remobilize whenever a moment like Arizona’s law gave it fresh urgency.

For related coverage of immigrant rights organizing, see our piece on the Dream Summer fellowship cultivating future immigrant rights leaders, or browse our full Policy & Rights archive.