Over a hundred people gathered on the sidewalk outside the Tesla dealership in Los Gatos on Saturday to protest violent immigration enforcement actions and the capture of Venezuela’s president.
Dozens of people turned out to speak against U.S. occupation in Venezuela and the shootings involving federal immigration agents in Portland, Ore., and Minneapolis, Minn. The protest was organized in collaboration with May Day Strong, a coalition of activists that generally mobilizes for workers’ rights. Together We Will/Indivisible Los Gatos was also involved in organizing the protest.
George Hoffman, a 49-year-old Los Gatos resident, said he got involved in protesting regularly because he got tired of feeling frustrated with President Donald Trump’s policies and actions. He has been protesting with Tesla Takedown, an organization that has been protesting once or twice a week outside the Tesla dealership since April.
“I just feel like this isn’t going to end well,” Hoffman said. “He’s going to keep on pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing,’ and either we end up living in a literal dictatorship or we push back enough.”
Many people in Los Gatos were protesting the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis. She was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer on Jan. 7. While federal officials argued that the officer was acting in self-defense and accused Good of using her car as a weapon, state and local officials and protesters who watched videos of the shooting denied those claims.
John Elliott, 77, and 20-year-old Campbell resident Michael Zambon both agreed that the Good’s shooting was against the law, saying that federal officers should not have the authority to kill someone without a reason.
“Not only do I believe that this administration is a regime of lawlessness, it’s a regime of cruelty,” Zambon said. “They take pleasure in people’s misfortune, people’s oppression, and I want to show that people care and not everyone is cruel.”
Elliott drew comparisons between the Minneapolis shooting and the shootings at Kent State University in 1970, when National Guardsman killed four students protesting the Vietnam War. He thought that the range of emotions toward Good’s shooting, from outrage to sympathetic to apathetic to justifying it, was similar to the response of the shooting at the college in the past. But ultimately, both events spurred protest and demonstrations against the government.
“They’re outraged that their government is doing this,” Elliott said. “The fear that this kind of activity demonstrates a fascist state, which nobody bought into, nobody agrees with. That’s what I see is similar.”
In another incident, a Customs and Border Protection agent shot and injured two people in their car in Portland in a targeted immigration enforcement investigation on Jan. 8. Avi Halem, an 18-year-old student in Portland who was visiting friends and family in San Jose, said he had heard the news about the shooting when his school sent out an email about it. He recalled feeling disappointment but not surprise at the news, especially in a city where he noticed numerous ICE officers “like cops walking around.”
“There’s a lot of horror…and a lot of being disappointed,” Halem said.
Others, like June Lugovoy, 67, were also protesting the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. The president and his wife Cilia Flores were captured a military operation on Jan. 3, while the Trump administration said it would oversee the South American country’s oil exports. Maduro is being accused of narco-terrorism, to which he pleaded not guilty in a New York courtroom on Jan. 5.
Lugovoy said the U.S.’s takeover of Venezuela sets a “really interesting precedent” of the U.S. intervening in foreign countries without any right to do so. Both Republicans and Democrats throughout history have backed coups in Latin American countries, including Cuba, Chile and Panama. Although she acknowledged that Maduro was a “terrible leader,” a perspective shared by many Venezuelan expatriates, she called the U.S.’s actions in the country illogical.
“What he’s saying is that we’re going to run this country and we’re going to run it better,” Lugovoy said. “He has no right to do that.”
Joan Eschenfelder, a 68-year-old San Jose resident, said she was compelled to act in light of the censoring of files related to the investigation of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and the inaction of Congress to deal with a president who had been charged with multiple felonies.
Eschenfelder expressed her frustration with the economic state of the country as well, saying that her bills had doubled and she has had to give money to family members to help them “meet rent and pay bills to survive.”
She believed that for things to change, younger people need to be elected and “given the opportunity to build.”
Hoffman echoed those sentiments, pointing out the interconnectedness between the issues people were protesting and calling for Congress to reassert its authority over the president.
“Fascism is something that prevents any of these issues from being pursued and any good of coming of anything,” Hoffman said.