Thousands of San Franciscans, many of them students, flooded Dolores Park on Friday afternoon to protest the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by ICE in Minneapolis.
Following the citywide general strike in Minneapolis a week prior, the protest was one of 300-plus across the country, part of a “National Shutdown” that called for “No work, no school, no shopping, no business as usual.”
Students from dozens of Bay Area schools coordinated their own walk-outs and joined in the protest. Many still wearing backpacks, they carried signs reading “Hot People Melt ICE,” “No one is illegal on stolen land,” and “We like our ice CRUSHED.”
Others hung from a light post at Dolores and 19th St., where the street signs had been replaced with “Abolish ICE” placards. A group of grade schoolers chanted, “The only ICE we like is ice cream.”
Over 70 businesses closed their doors on Friday in solidarity with the strike, according to a list compiled by Mission Local.
“You see what a general strike does is it teaches ordinary people, teaches all of us, that we run this s— ourselves,” said Sebastián Puerta, a UC Berkeley PhD student and head steward of UAW 4811. “These streets, these parks, these cities, this whole economy, it doesn’t belong to the billionaires, it belongs to us.”
