A physical and political chill swept through the air on January 20 as thousands gathered in Washington Square Park to protest Donald Trump’s second inauguration. The demonstration was one of approximately 700 nationwide rallies demanding immigrant safety, gender justice, and Palestinian liberation. People around the world also dissented in anticipation of Trump’s global tariffs and planned encroachments on Central America.
The federal holiday honoring civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. coincided with Trump’s inauguration. Although Trump declared in his address that “We will strive together to make his dream a reality,” the dominant opinion among protesters was that the shared date was heresy. Some proposed that if he were still alive, he would be protesting Trump alongside them; actor Susan Sarandon quoted Dr. King: “Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals.”
Turnout was noticeably lower than prior mobilizations against Trump. The 2017 Women’s March held in response to his first inauguration had an estimated attendance of nearly half a million people, making it the largest single-day protest in U.S. history at the time. This time around, the atmosphere was different: Trump had taken all of the battleground states and won the popular vote. The attitude of much of his previous opposition seemed to no longer be anger, but rather bleak acceptance. One protester in the crowd expressed concern that “There’s a lot of people who have just kind of thrown up their hands; we need to make sure they understand that we will not give up the fight.”
The topic of immigration was on everyone’s mind. Protesters chanted, “No hate, no fear; refugees are welcome here,” holding signs in both English and Spanish. Hunter College’s Committee to Defend Immigrants, formed in response to Trump’s 2017 Muslim travel ban, was present. Meanwhile in Washington, D.C., President Trump promised to “begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came,” newly allowing ICE to make arrests at schools, hospitals, and churches. These threats are particularly chilling for New York City, where migrants make up approximately 38% of the population. Mayor Eric Adams attended the inauguration and has not taken a clear stance on the policy at the time of this article’s writing; numerous interviewees at the protest expressed disgust towards him.
People in the crowd had varying attitudes on America’s political shift towards the right since 2016. Danica, an undergraduate student at NYU, was “really disappointed” at the result of the election: “I hate to say this—Trump had a better chance of winning because people hate women.” (Trump has received dozens of sexual assault allegations since the 1970s and recently bragged that he was the “guy [who] ended Roe v. Wade.”) A community organizer had a different perspective, claiming that the two-party system is fundamentally flawed: “It matters a little bit who’s president, but generally speaking the wars [abroad] and the attacks on our rights continue. There’s a saying, ‘The Democrats have no friend on the left and the Republicans have no enemy on the right,’ [meaning both parties] are just going to the right more and more.”
Hovering around the back was a group of pro-Trump counterprotesters. Decked out in MAGA hats and waving joint Israeli-American flags, they alternated between chanting “God bless America” and shouting “Go die in Gaza” to pro-Palestine onlookers. Police watched from the sidelines.
