Protesters marched through downtown Raleigh on Monday, Jan. 20 to protest Donald Trump’s return to office. (Photo: Brandon Kingdollar)
Hundreds of protesters flooded Raleigh’s Moore Square to protest President Donald Trump’s return to office just hours after his inauguration Monday, denouncing his policy plans on immigration, abortion access, and international affairs.
In many ways, the Raleigh protest — the first glimpse of an organized resistance to Trump’s second term — bore a greater resemblance to the campus protests against the War in Gaza in 2023 and 2024 than it did the demonstrations against his first term. Activists weathered the near-freezing temperatures in keffiyehs and masks and chanted “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as they marched down Blount Street.
But signs of the first resistance movement against Trump could be seen throughout the crowd that gathered in Moore Square. Some women donned pink, cat-eared “pussyhats,” a hallmark of the 2017 Women’s March that flooded Washington in the wake of Trump’s first inauguration. And protesters seemed to share common ground with former President Joe Biden on his warnings against a growing “tech-industrial complex” in the country — speakers took aim at Tesla CEO Elon Musk for his influence in the new administration and held signs calling to “Defeat Trump’s billionaire agenda!”
“We will fight back against Trump’s extreme right-wing, anti-immigrant, anti-worker, imperialist agenda, a billionaire agenda,” said Victor Urquiza, an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation who emceed the protest. “We stand here in firm solidarity with the Palestinian people [who] for 470 days resisted the Israeli genocide funded by this government, by the Democratic Party.”
The protest, titled “We Fight Back,” brought together a wide array of left-wing activist groups in opposition to Trump and in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. One banner held by the demonstrators as they marched read, “Honor MLK’s Legacy & Struggle Fighting Against Poverty, Racism, & Militarism.” Beside it, activists hoisted a giant puppet of Trump, featuring a pair of blood-stained hands.
Much of the afternoon’s rhetoric centered on immigration issues, as Trump’s administration prepares a crackdown on undocumented immigrants around the country and threatens to end birthright citizenship, a principle enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. The Wall Street Journal reported ahead of the transition that mass deportation operations may begin as soon as Tuesday, a shock-and-awe approach expected to target major metropolitan areas beginning with Chicago.
While opposition to the second Trump administration framed the protest, many demonstrators appeared to view Trump and Biden with equal animosity. Urquiza laid blame for the more than 46,000 killed in Gaza at Biden’s feet, condemning him for continuing to support Israel’s war effort “to the very last day of the presidency.” At the same time, Urquiza rejected the narrative that Trump was responsible for the ceasefire in Gaza, a victory his administration has tried to claim as it takes over. “Let’s make this very, very clear: this ceasefire was because of the people in Palestine who resisted every single day,” he said to cheers.
Wayne Turner, who ran for Governor of North Carolina on the Green Party ticket and tabled at the demonstration Monday, took a similar view. “I don’t distinguish much between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, or Donald Trump and Kamala Harris,” Turner said. “For me, the problem is capitalism and empire.”
Speakers called on the crowd to fight back against Trump’s stated plans to enact mass deportations, to curtail access to reproductive healthcare, and to remain steadfast in support of Israel. They flew Mexican and Palestinian flags and chanted, “From Palestine to Mexico, border walls have got to go.” Tables set up in the square distributed literature on the War in Gaza, Trump’s immigration plans, and socialist theory. One group, Siembra NC, handed out flyers for an “ICE Watch Training” to be held in Raleigh and Durham over the weekend.
“How do we fight back against Trump’s plans to deport millions of immigrants? His attack on the workers, his attack on the LGBT community, his continuation of American crimes across the world, and his continuation of taking the wealth of working class people and giving it to the billionaires?” Urquiza asked. “We must have the strongest solidarity we have ever had, and we must organize and organize like we never organized before.”
Underscoring the demonstration is a belief that all these issues — from immigration and climate change to economic inequality and the War in Gaza — are connected and must be confronted as one. Urquiza invoked Martin Luther King Jr. — “the real Dr. King,” he said, rather than a sanitized presentation of his views — to drive home this idea, telling the crowd he “would be right here in the streets with us” if alive today and quoting his remark that “capitalism has outlived its usefulness.”
Samuel Scarborough, a UNC student who distributed literature for the Union of Southern Service Workers at the protest, said he is not concerned about rhetoric on Palestinian issues alienating moderates who might otherwise oppose Trump’s policies so long as the left can “creatively connect the issues that are facing working class Americans here to what is going on in Gaza.” He referenced King’s belief that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
“I felt very excited seeing the amount of people out there and also the number of organizations because I’m starting to see the networks, especially around labor here locally, get really firm,” Scarborough said. “In the circles that I’m involved with, I think there’s going to be heightened resistance [to Trump.]”
He said the student movement that has swept college campuses since 2023 in protest of the Israeli offensive into Gaza provides a strong foundation for the fight against Trump’s policies, comparing it to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of the 1960s that formed a key pillar of both the American Civil Rights Movement and the opposition to the Vietnam War.
“Trump is not an individual. Trumpism, MAGA, is a movement, and the only way to stop a movement is with a counter-movement,” he said. “If we do not come together collectively and form that counter-movement, this country’s is going to continue shifting rightward and we are going to see fascism, unabridged, more and more in the coming days.”