Hundreds of people gathered in downtown Iowa City Saturday to join a nationwide protest organized by Indivisible, a decentralized network of progressive groups, as part of the newly launched 50501 movement — a grassroots campaign pushing for action in all 50 states to defend democratic rights and resist authoritarianism through coordinated protests.
Sue Thompson, a member of Indivisible Johnson County who organized Saturday’s protest and the April 5 “Hands Off” rally, said approximately 500 people had registered to attend the protest Friday night, but she estimated the crowd size on Saturday was closer to 800.
“I’m so glad that we could be together as a community, because that’s what everybody needs right now,” Thompson said. “Instead of feeling isolated and scared because that’s what they want us to feel.”
On its Instagram page, the 50501 movement reported over five million people participated in the nationwide protests on April 19.
Compared to the April 5 rally, Saturday’s protest in Iowa City placed greater emphasis on immigration enforcement, especially the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man from Maryland who was mistakenly deported and imprisoned last month in a maximum-security facility in El Salvador.
Fleeing gang violence in El Salvador, Abrego Garcia entered the U.S. illegally in 2011 and was granted protection from being deported to El Salvador by an immigration judge in 2019. The Associated Press reported that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials admitted in a March 31 court filing that Abrego Garcia’s deportation resulted from an administrative error.
Abrego Garcia was one of several hundred men President Donald Trump’s administration sent to the El Salvadorian terrorism confinement center known as CECOT on March 15.
After a short march through downtown Iowa City, Thompson addressed the crowd, many holding signs demanding the return of Abrego Garcia, by highlighting an upcoming May 1 rally against mass deportations, organized by the local immigration advocacy group Escucha Mi Voz.
Iowa Sen. Janice Weiner, D-Iowa City, also spoke Saturday, reminding attendees April 19 is the anniversary of the start of the American Revolutionary War and also the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, when Jewish resistance fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto refused to surrender to the German occupying forces.
RELATED: ‘Hands Off’ rally draws more than 1,000 protesters in downtown Iowa City Saturday
“Courage and truth-telling and the willingness to stand up to arbitrary authority must be our North Star,” Weiner said to the crowd. “This may require more courage than most of us individually can muster. But together as a community, we the people are strong.”
Weiner also urged the University of Iowa to join a Mutual Defense Compact, proposed by Rutgers, Indiana University Bloomington, Michigan State, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in response to escalating political pressures from the Trump administration. The compact would commit member schools to collectively defend academic freedom and support institutions targeted by government crackdowns.
“This is a time, as we’re seeing all over this country, for strength in numbers,” Weiner said. “It is a time for universities to join forces with one another.”
Ali Hanson, a neuroscientist who also spoke at the April 5 rally, took the mic again, emphasizing that the impact of the Trump administration surpasses the cuts to the National Institute of Health and other scientific funding that affects her field.
“They’re not after a specific scientific subject or word. They are after knowledge itself. They are after free speech, and they are after our minds,” Hanson said. “Because dictators and autocrats do not want an educated, free-thinking citizenry that can be critical of what they’re doing.”
Prompting the crowd to chant Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s name, Hanson emphasized the conditions inmates at CECOT face.
“He got put into one of the world’s worst prisons, a mega prison, for suspected terrorists with no evidence whatsoever of him being any such thing,” Hanson said, adding that inmates at CECOT receive no outdoor time, exercise, books, health care, and are not allowed to speak to each other.
Attendee Annie Carlson interrupted Hanson’s statement, yelling out her belief that CECOT should be described as a concentration camp.
CBS News reported 75 percent of the 238 men sent to CECOT have no criminal record in the U.S. or abroad. According to a report from Bloomberg, that number could be as high as 90 percent.
In her speech, Hanson stressed that sending people to a terrorism confinement center without due process is a clear human rights violation and warned that eroding due process for some endangers the rights of everyone.
“Just know that if that can happen to this person, this can happen to you, and it can happen to me for saying these words,” Hanson said. “Tomorrow morning, I might wake up and there might be some masked men outside with an unmarked car, and away I go. I could be disappeared. That’s the world we live in as of today.”
Expressing doubt in the power of the courts in the guarantee of a next round of elections, Hanson urged the crowd to organize locally and act with urgency.
“Remember this moment, your feet on this ground here in this country, in Iowa City, as the moment that the revolution really begins,” Hanson said.
Johnson County Supervisor Mandi Remington spoke next, echoing Hanson’s points and indicating her belief that the Trump administration’s focus on limiting diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives is part of the larger goal of disempowering people.
“When we recognize how our oppression overlaps, how racism, ableism, homophobia, and sexism reinforce each other, we get stronger, smarter, and harder to divide,” Remington said. “And that’s exactly why they’re being attacked.”
Describing leadership in Iowa as a “Republican trifecta,” Remington said what she sees as the goals of the Trump administration have been carried out by Republican leaders in Iowa since before Trump took office.
“They’ve stripped civil rights protections from transgender Iowans, scrubbed websites, and threatened the livelihoods of those who have dared to push back,” Remington said. “All while our schools are told to stay silent, our libraries are targeted, and our most vulnerable neighbors are pushed further into the margins.”
Remington said while the state and federal governments can strip DEI initiatives and shutter DEI offices, they cannot deprive people of their ability to organize with like-minded community members around what many perceive as threats to various marginalized communities under Trump’s administration.
“Intersectionality isn’t just a word. It’s our survival strategy,” Remington said. “When they come for one of us, they’ll have to face us all, and that terrifies them.”
Other speakers included nurse Eric Kusiak, neuroscientist Alex Petrucci, Iowa City Federation of Labor President Scott Puteney, Ed Cranston of the Johnson County Democrats, and Jennifer Breon representing Food and Water Watch.
In addition to the speaker lineup, several organizations — including Food and Water Watch, the Johnson County Democrats, Stand Up for Science, the Domestic Violence Intervention Program, Moms Demand Action, the Immigrant Welcome Network, and the ACLU — hosted informational tables.
In an interview with The Daily Iowan, Breon said a pressing issue for Food and Water Watch, a nonprofit that advocates for safe food, clean water, and government accountability, is recent staffing cuts at the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA.
“There was a whole E. coli outbreak that we didn’t know about because there’s no one left at FDA to monitor and report and do the inspections and make sure that our food system is safe,” Breon said.
Michelle Chen at the Stand Up for Science table identified three policy goals the group’s Iowa chapter is pushing: restoring and expanding science funding, reinstating DEI and accessibility programs, and ending censorship of scientific language in grant applications and public communications.
Ben Kelvington, also with Stand Up for Science, said the group has grown since its protest on the Pentacrest last month.
“We have people involved across the state now,” Kelvington said. “We’ve grown to hundreds of people in our email list. So, there’s a lot of momentum.”
Alta Medea, director of community engagement for the Domestic Violence Intervention Program, said the organization is advocating for the Iowa Senate and House to approve $10 million in funding for victims’ services.
“That funding is the minimum to provide services across the state for victim-survivors that are increasing in the number of folks reaching out,” Medea said. “Programs like ours and others across the state are facing very uncertain funding with the federal government, so we’re asking the state to step up and fund services.”