May Day protests across Illinois link labor, immigration rights and anti-war calls

CHICAGO – Georgette Foss, 66, walked hand in hand Friday through Union Park with her friend Mary Shapiro, 64, holding a sign that read, “Workers over billionaires — fund communities, not wars.”

“My neighbors are being snatched off the streets. I’m worried about retiring at the end of this year and having the government take my Social Security, and about my grandson not having access to a neighborhood school,” Foss said at a recent May Day protest.

Foss and Shapiro were among tens of thousands of Illinoisans who took to the streets Friday afternoon for May Day demonstrations, with rallies held at more than 50 locations across the state, according to the May Day Strong website.

May Day, also known as International Workers’ Day, is an annual day of demonstrations held worldwide on May 1 in solidarity with the labor movement. While its origins trace back to the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago, a defining moment for workers’ rights, the day has since expanded to include a broader range of social justice causes, including immigrant rights and, this year, calls to end the war in Iran.

The state’s largest rally drew thousands to downtown Chicago, where leaders, including Mayor Brandon Johnson, emphasized the needs of the city’s working people and its immigrant and refugee communities. Amid heightened immigration enforcement following “Operation Midway Blitz,” many attendees carried signs calling for federal agents to leave their neighborhoods.

Federal agents carried out the immigration enforcement campaign for three months last fall in the Chicago area before disbanding.

Protest focuses varied across the state, including on public university campuses, where labor and immigration issues intersected.

Downstate protests

At the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, protesters connected labor demands with concerns over reported local immigration enforcement activity.

“Certain local immigration rights organizations had heard that federal agents were going to be coming up to Champaign-Urbana,” said Thair Thursday, a member of the Graduate Employees’ Organization at U of I.  “We weren’t sure whether it was for immigration-related enforcement. However, we’ve seen in other places, Minneapolis being one example, that the presence of federal agents for non-immigration-related activity does not preclude the possibility of immigration-related activity.”

He added that these reports came as demands for protections were already in development.

On May Day, organizers including graduate employees, undergraduate groups and local unions delivered these demands to the university, calling for protections against Immigrations and Customs Enforcement for students and workers. The proposals include restricting ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents’ access to campus buildings, canceling contracts with corporations that collaborate with immigration enforcement and providing support for students and workers facing deportation or visa revocation.

Further north, at Illinois State University, where non-teaching staff have been on strike for nearly a month, students and workers gathered to advocate for a fair contract, holding signs calling for union rights and better pay.

Keith Pluymers, an assistant professor of history and vice president of United Faculty ISU, said the protest reflects two “contrasting visions” for the future of higher education — one from university administrators and the other from labor advocates.

“What you see from the university administration is a vision of higher education that is a miserable death spiral,” Pluymers said Friday. “In contrast, what you’re going to see today with the events we organized is that labor and students and community groups can see a much better future for what it should look like.’’

Pluymers added he hopes the protest demonstrates that university workers are invested in their institution’s future and are working to build a school the entire state can be proud of.

“We need support from across the state,” he said. “Because the alternative is that you’re going to have people in charge who are willing to let conditions get a little bit worse and a little bit grimmer for students who go to a public university.”

Chloe Park is an undergraduate student in journalism with Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications, and is a fellow in its Medill Illinois News Bureau working in partnership with Capitol News Illinois.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.