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sunrise movement
'A Moment of Reckoning': 4,000+ May Day Demonstrations Across US
“During the ‘No Kings’ demonstrations, we showed what we’re against. May Day is the day we’re making clear what we are fighting for," said one organizer.
May 01, 2026
In thousands of locations across the United States, workers and students are taking off from work and school and swearing off shopping on Friday as part of a national May Day protest.
May Day Strong, a coalition of activist groups and unions organizing the events, said more than 4,000 actions, from marches to pickets to displays of peaceful civil disobedience, were underway.
It is yet another nationwide display of coordinated resistance to the Trump administration's agenda, including its war in Iran and its use of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to attack immigrant communities, issues that were at the forefront of March's "No Kings" protests.
Six young protesters with the Sunrise Movement were taken into custody after blocking a bridge in Minneapolis in what they said was an act of "nonviolent noncooperation" to "stand up to the war in Iran and against ICE terrorizing our neighbors and our cities."
Dozens more Sunrise protesters in Portland held a sit-in in the lobby of a Hilton hotel that was housing top officials with the Department of Homeland Security, leading to eight arrests.
"It's May 1st, it's workers' day," one of the protesters was recorded saying while being led away by police. "Don't forget that you have power."
In New York, over 100 activists lined up outside every entrance to the New York Stock Exchange in downtown Manhattan, banging drums and chanting "No ICE, no war!" where they were met by a flood of cops.
In the spirit of May Day, a global day of solidarity among workers, Sulma Arias, the executive director of the social justice organization People's Action, said Friday's "Workers Over Billionaires" protests are just as much about confronting injustices as about building an alternative.
“During the ‘No Kings’ demonstrations, we showed what we’re against. May Day is the day we’re making clear what we are fighting for," Arias said. "We are for affordable housing for low-income people. We are for free healthcare for all. We are for utility laws that ensure every home stays warm in the winter and cool in the summer at costs that a person on a fixed income can afford. We are for the right to a fair and equal vote for Americans from every race and in every state. May Day is our day to assert and defend our rights.”
"They want us afraid. They want us divided. But on May 1, we refuse."
Despite claims by President Donald Trump that the US is entering an economic "golden age" under his leadership, a Gallup poll released this week found that 55% of Americans said their finances were getting worse, the highest number ever recorded in more than 20 years of polling, and even higher than in the doldrums of the Great Recession.
A coalition of labor unions across several major cities, including Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles, has coordinated what has been called an "economic blackout," which includes avoiding buying from private sector retailers.
"When we say 'workers over billionaires,' 'billionaires' is not just this amorphous figure, right? They're real people," said Jana Korn, the chief of staff for the Philadelphia Council AFL-CIO, in an interview with The Real News Network. "In Philadelphia, we're kind of a poor city. We don't have that many billionaires, but we have one. The CEO of Comcast is the only billionaire that lives in the city."
"So why should we, as a city, accept that they take and take from us? And then with that money, what do they do? They donate to Trump's ballroom project," she continued. "People in Philadelphia are struggling... Our transportation system barely works. We're at risk of having 17 schools close down this year."
Some labor organizers have described economic boycotts, undertaken as part of prior mass protest movements against the second Trump administration, as an act of building strength for something larger, such as a future general strike.
"I think really for us in the labor movement," Korn said, "[the boycott is] about how do we build the capacity to really disrupt, to strike when necessary, to shut things down when we have to. And that's something that we have not been called to do as a labor movement in a very long time."
Other unions have used May Day to confront their own employers directly. In New Orleans, hundreds of nurses at University Medical Center announced that they were beginning a five-day strike after attempting to negotiate a contract for more than two years.
In New York City, Amazon workers unionized with the Teamsters assembled on the steps of the public library before marching to Amazon's corporate offices to demand the company cut its contracts with ICE, which has used its cloud computing services to target immigrants, including some Amazon workers and contractors.
Matt Multari, who has worked as an Amazon driver for a year and a half, told Mother Jones that he joined the protest to "demand the one thing that’s worth fighting for in this life: respect."
Masih Fouladi, executive director of the California Immigrant Policy Center, said, "May Day is a moment of reckoning."
"Immigrant communities—from farmworkers in our fields to nurses in our hospitals, from refugees fleeing war to families who have built their lives here for generations—are under siege," she said. "They want us afraid. They want us divided. But on May 1, we refuse."
"Workers and immigrants—documented and undocumented, native-born and newly arrived," she said, "will stand together in the streets because we know the truth: there is no workers' rights without immigrant rights, and there is no justice for working people here while our tax dollars fund devastation abroad."
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The Fight for a Livable Climate Is the Fight Against Fossil-Fueled Fascism
The fossil fuel industry is funding fascism because they know they lose in a democracy. Young people are ready to fight for both, because we see them as inseparable.
Apr 04, 2026
In early 2025, Sunrise launched a campaign to make polluters pay for the effects of climate disasters. This campaign had the usual strengths: a focused message, easy to villainize targets, and real opportunities for state-level wins. It allowed us to engage the public directly following climate disasters, when attention to the climate crisis is highest.
But taking the campaign from the drawing board to the streets felt like pulling teeth. It was hard to recruit young people, bring local hubs on board, and build organic momentum. Our leadership team felt unmotivated and lethargic. Ignoring the elephant in the room of escalating fascism was getting to all of us.
In response, our leadership team came together over the summer to reevaluate and reassess the broader landscape. We watched Immigration and Customs Enforcement escalate in Los Angeles, watched as President Donald Trump broke every rule in the book and rapidly consolidated power. He was gutting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), dragging us back into the coal era, joking about running in 2028, and threatening to cancel elections. It became very clear that running a Make Polluters Pay campaign was like bringing a knife to a gunfight (figuratively of course).
Here’s what we realized:
1. Local Wins Cannot Outpace an Administration Fully Captured by Big Oil
From a purely emissions perspective, we were losing. We could get a few polluters to pay for cleanup costs. In some states, like California or New York, state legislation mattered a good amount. But while we were focused on state-level policy, the Trump administration was opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, reversing vehicle emission standards, withdrawing from international climate agreements again, eliminating the Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) tax credits, and staffing the EPA with fossil fuel executives. It was changing the green economy so that there was less incentive to build wind and solar, pausing IRA-funded projects, and actively driving up pollution. We were just being outstripped.
2. We Can’t Wait This Out Until Trump Leaves Office
Many of our partner organizations decided to focus on local organizing for three years in order to prepare for what we wanted to win when we won back power. However, this approach depends on stable democratic systems, and the ability to organize freely. Both of which are increasingly unrealistic based on our assessment.
First, Trump may not leave office. He’s openly discussed ignoring term limits. He’s installing loyalists throughout the military and Justice Department. Republican state legislatures are passing laws that would allow them to override election results. Trump has looked at changing ID requirements to require proof of citizenship to vote, and has gerrymandered and mandated Republican states redraw districts. Even if he personally leaves, it’s very likely that he will change the rules of the game to make it basically impossible for a Democratic trifecta to come to power—and because of our levels of polarization, that’s the starting point for climate legislation.
Second, protest is being criminalized. Anti-protest laws passed in 17 states since 2024. Sunrise itself was going to be targeted. Our infrastructure was likely to walk out of the next few years weaker, not stronger.
We need a movement that can force Trump out of office. That won’t be a single-issue movement.
3. Under a Functional Democracy, We Would Already Have Widespread Climate Action
As we started to explore further, it became clear the links between rising fascism and the climate crisis.
Public opinion data currently shows that people support climate action by significant margins: 65% of Americans support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant; 72% support transitioning to clean energy. Majorities support Green New Deal-style investments.
In a functional democracy, that should translate to legislation, easily. But our fight for Build Back Better—what later got watered down into the Inflation Reduction Act—taught us that it wasn’t that simple. The broken link—the reality that our government is more bought out by pharmaceutical companies and fossil fuels than it is accountable to everyday people—is exactly how Donald Trump won, promising to be an un-buyable strongman.
And fossil fuel companies recognized that as well. The Biden administration was a clear lesson for fossil fuels: Under a democracy, they will lose their business model. So they’ve made a calculated decision to fund authoritarianism, because under authoritarianism, they win. Fossil fuel industry donations to Trump’s 2024 campaign reached record levels. Trump promised oil executives whatever they wanted in exchange for $1 million in campaign donations. Oil executives are staffing his administration at unprecedented rates. This is fossil-fueled fascism. If we want to stop the climate crisis, we need a democracy that can’t be bought.
4. We need a massive base
The final reason came down to our base and organizing. At the end of the day, Sunrise has always been by and for young people, and the reality that we saw on the ground was that young people were deeply concerned about rising authoritarianism and didn’t know what to do about it. Running a climate-only campaign under these conditions felt like we were ignoring reality. Our members had an intuitive sense that to stop climate change, we needed to stop authoritarianism first.
The last six months have only confirmed that instinct. Students showed up in record numbers to fight for sanctuary campuses and to stop Donald Trump’s compacts with universities. Our hotel non-cooperation campaigns went viral, and since we’ve broadened our focus, young people have increasingly come to consider Sunrise their political home.
Sunrise’s Strategic Pivot
So we made a decision: Sunrise is pivoting to end authoritarianism and win a democracy capable of addressing the climate crisis.
We’re still a climate movement, but this moment requires the acknowledgment that climate action is impossible under authoritarianism. Winning democracy is a precondition for winning climate policy. The fossil fuel industry is funding fascism because they know they lose in a democracy. Young people are ready to fight for both, because we see them as inseparable.
Our strategy is ambitious, reflecting the scale of the challenge, with three main goals:
- Build the youth base and organizing infrastructure needed to defeat authoritarianism;
- Win structural democracy reforms like proportional representation and public financing that make oil industry capture impossible; and
- Use that democracy to pass transformational climate legislation and defend it long-term.
It’s ambitious, but it’s the only path that works.
This piece was first published on the Sunrise Movement Substack.
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Columbia Students and Faculty Arrested at 'ICE Off Campus' Protest in NYC
Protest organizer Sunrise Movement said “Columbia’s original collaboration with ICE and the Trump administration set the stage for the ICE raids and extrajudicial murders that are now terrorizing communities nationwide."
Feb 06, 2026
A dozen people were arrested Thursday after Columbia University students and professors blocked a major intersection in Upper Manhattan to demand that the Ivy League school declare itself a sanctuary from federal immigration enforcers.
The Columbia chapter of Sunrise Movement—the youth-led climate campaign—organized the protest, which drew more than 150 people on a subfreezing afternoon to condemn US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and what they say is the university's cooperation with the Trump administration.
“Columbia’s original collaboration with ICE and the Trump administration set the stage for the ICE raids and extrajudicial murders that are now terrorizing communities nationwide,” Sunrise Columbia said in a statement following the protest.
A smaller group of protesters blocked the intersection of Broadway and 116th Street, site of the main entrance to the Columbia campus in Morningside Heights, at around 3:00 pm Thursday, according to the Columbia Spectator. Activists sat in a crosswalk wearing matching shirts reading "Sanctuary Campus Now" as chants of "No ICE, no KKK, no fascist USA!" and "When immigrants are under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back!" echoed through the air.
RIGHT NOW, Columbia University students & faculty demand a sanctuary campus. ICE OUT OF NYC. ❤️🔥 pic.twitter.com/zaLbor8EJf
— Columbia Palestine Solidarity Coalition (CPSC) (@Columbia_psc) February 5, 2026
“It’s very meaningful for faculty and students to take action alongside each other and even get arrested alongside each other,” Columbia student Adeline Sauberli told the Spectator. “I think it’s a message of hope, almost, that you know the core of the Columbia community, the students and faculty who are in classrooms together and talking about ways that the world can be better are also willing to take to the streets and say that we shouldn’t have ICE here.”
Columbia Teachers College adjunct professor E.Y. Zipris told the Spectator that “if I was to really continue to respect the university, then I have to join in with those who are fighting to remind Columbia of how it’s supposed to be."
“For faculty to put themselves in this position where they will be handcuffed and led into an awaiting van and then driven downtown is a tremendous statement of calling out the institution, the board of trustees, and everybody involved, saying, ‘Our students are more important to us than caring for, in this moment, our own actual well being,’" Zipris added.
New York Police Department (NYPD) officers began arresting the protesters blocking the intersection after issuing warnings to disperse. The New York Times reported that the arrests were "calm and deliberate," a "marked contrast from the overwhelming show of force and rows of riot police that often met protesters outside Columbia during the past two years" of protests against the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and Columbia's complicity in the slaughter.
US police arrested 12 anti-ICE protesters at Columbia University in New York. The demonstrators accuse the university of cooperating with immigration enforcement agents and are demanding the campus be declared a sanctuary.
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— Al Jazeera English (@aljazeera.com) February 6, 2026 at 2:07 AM
Organizers of Thursday's action accused Columbia's board of trustees of complicity with the Trump administration's deadly immigration crackdown, pointing to ICE's arrest of former Columbia graduate student and Gaza protest organizer Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent US resident who was abducted last March by ICE agents in front of his pregnant wife and jailed without charge or trial in Louisiana before being released in late June.
Other Columbia students who took part in Gaza protests, including green-card holders Mohsen Mahdawi and Yunseo Chung and Palestinian Leqaa Kordia, were also arrested last year.
According to the Spectator:
Protesters called on the university to stop sharing student, faculty, and staff information with the Department of Homeland Security and other law enforcement agencies; remove members of the board of trustees who have “enabled the Trump administration’s repression of noncitizens"; end the surveillance and discipline of students for political activity; and clarify how the university has implemented its $221 million agreement with the Trump administration.
“Over the past two years, we’ve seen Columbia violently suppress student speech exposing Columbia’s complicity in ongoing genocide in Palestine,” student organizer Cameron Jones told the New York Daily News. “By suspending, brutalizing, and facilitating the kidnapping of their students, the university has made clear that there is no line it will not cross in service of genocidal regimes.”
BREAKING: Columbia students and faculty are blocking the road to demand Columbia become sanctuary campus.That means ending collaboration with ICE's kidnapping of students and workers.
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— Sunrise Movement (@sunrisemvmt.bsky.social) February 5, 2026 at 1:33 PM
Columbia University denies that it worked with ICE to arrest students, saying in a statement that it "supports the right of individuals to peacefully protest. However, claims made against the university during today’s protest activity, which took place outside of our gates, are factually incorrect."
Arrestee Jennifer Hirsch, a professor at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health, told the New York Times that “Columbia was the test case for this government strategy of kidnapping people first and then asking questions later."
In a separate interview with the Spectator, Hirsch said that “it says in the Torah, be kind to the stranger for you are a stranger in a strange land and that was actually in my bat mitzvah Torah portion, and so I’m just responding to what to this moment asks of all of us."
“I think history will judge us for what we do at this moment,” Hirsch said. “It’s scary and dangerous but it’s more scary and dangerous to have masked agents come to your door, break down your door, and kidnap you.”
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