WILLISTON — Immigrant rights, trans rights, worker rights and support for Palestinians were forefront at a May Day rally in Williston Thursday evening. Organizers estimated 2,500 people marched to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s facility on Harvest Lane and then to Hannaford Supermarket in a peaceful protest that condemned recent actions of President Donald Trump’s administration.
“I’m here because I believe in social justice and human rights,” said Joanna Cole, a former state representative who lives in Shelburne. She came to participate in the rally with her partner, Sarah Flynn, outside the ICE facility.
“I do not want any immigrants forced out, especially illegally,” she said, referring to recent student arrests and ICE raids in Vermont. “I think it’s horrible so many people are being kidnapped off the street and being thrown in jail.”
“It smacks of Hitler in Germany and of McCarthyism in the U.S. and I don’t want to be any part of it,” Cole added.
Community groups, labor unions, student and faith communities rallied across Vermont and around the nation on May Day, commemorated as international workers’ day in a demonstration of mass solidarity.
From the ICE data center in Williston to the Statehouse in Montpelier and beyond, Vermonters denounced “billionaire profiteers” and actions of the Trump administration that has launched a concerted effort to dismantle government and the rights of workers, immigrants and other vulnerable groups nationwide.
As Cole spoke, drumbeats and chants on Williston Road heralded the arrival of a large march organized by Migrant Justice joined by multiple labor and advocacy organizations. “An injury to one is an injury to all,” read the handmade banner held by three people up front flanked by another three people holding Palestinian flags and one waving the stars and stripes.
“We are here at ICE, the same people who took our brother Mohsen, who we freed yesterday,” said an organizer wearing a red and white kaffiyeh, a scarf often worn to show solidarity with Palestinians.
During a speech she called for “No ICE and no deportations” amid loud cheers outside the red brick federal building where a handful of federal workers stood guard in full uniform with marked cars during the peaceful rally.
Student supporters, hospital union leaders, a representative from Vermonters for Justice in Palestine and another from the FreeHer campaign gave short speeches in front of the federal building, punctuated by drum beats, chants and cheering from the large group.
Jacob Berkowitz, president of UVMMC Support Staff United at the University of Vermont Medical Center, said he joined the rally to “stand up and speak for those that cannot,” such as immigrant workers, those who are poor and those who face violence everyday.
While Trump has been in power for just more than 100 days, his mass deportation plan has had significant impact in Vermont, from the recent arrest of eight migrant dairy workers at Berkshire and the detainment of a Palestinian student in Colchester to revoking the legal statuses of some resettled groups, freezing funding for refugee support and jeopardizing local jobs. And it continues to try to prevent a detained Tufts student’s return to Vermont.
“This lays bare a fundamental truth. Prisons and police have always been weapons of class warfare,” said Jonathan Elwell, an organizer from FreeHer Vermont, a prison abolition group, in a brief speech. “No matter how hard the goons who run them try to frame prisons as apolitical tools of public safety or spout progressive promises of rehabilitation, we know the truth. They are always deployed against those who are dispossessed, differentiated or dissident.”
Protesters waved signs signaling their opposition to Trump, ICE, prisons, capitalism, the muzzling of free speech and democracy: ‘Power to the workers, not the billionaires,’ ‘ICE is terrorism,’ ‘Respect the Constitution.’ ‘Good dogs eat fascists,’ read a cardboard sign attached to a brown dog’s harness.
“I’m making it a point to go to a lot of protests just because I do not like what the Trump administration is doing. I am especially upset about deportations without a trial,” said Monica Hawkes, who came from Jeffersonville to join the Williston protest.
Continuing on, the march ended around the boundaries of the Hannaford Supermarket on Marshall Avenue around 8 p.m., with Migrant Justice advocates and allies demanding the grocery chain join the Milk With Dignity campaign in a continued effort to fight for the rights of farmworkers.
Migrant Justice launched the campaign in 2019 to promote fair wages and dignity on farms and demands that Hannaford improve conditions on the farms that supply its dairy products. The nonprofit representing immigrant farmworkers statewide filed a complaint in the Netherlands last month outlining human rights violations in Hannaford’s supply chain. The U.S. grocery chain is a subsidiary of Ahold Delhaize, a Dutch-Belgian multinational company.
“I think a huge place that unites us is that we are all working people and we are powerful if we are in solidarity,” said Bex Love from Northfield.
Love sported black-and-white cow print and helped hold up a towering makeshift white cow, made to support Milk With Dignity, with her friend Izzy de Buy Wenniger, of Burlington, at the picket line near the grocery store. There, security guards blocked marchers from going on the property.
On the sidewalk outside, speakers once again lined up to share their thoughts.
“Under Donald Trump, our lives are under attack,” said a Franklin County farmworker who identified herself as Maribel. Her comments, spoken in Spanish, were translated by Will Lambek, a spokesperson for Migrant Justice. Despite working long, hard hours, farmworkers like herself are not given the dignity of a fair wage, health care or safe housing, Maribel added, and corporations like Hannaford continue to exploit them.
As she called for solidarity on the packed sidewalk in the fading light of the waning day, allies applauded, a child drummed on an upside down paint bucket, and a passing car honked in support.
