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 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 President Joe Biden’s handling of the US role in Israel and Gaza.

This year, May Day also fell on the same day as a Donald 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.

“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,”