One dozen New Mexico cities to join nationwide ‘Hands Off’ protests
Protesters in Santa Fe, Las Cruces and 10 other cities across New Mexico plan to rally Saturday as part of a national “Hands Off” movement opposing Donald Trump and his political agenda.
Demonstrations in 12 New Mexico cities are part of a national protest effort against the return of Trump-era policies
Austin Fisher, Source New Mexico
This article was originally published by Source New Mexico.
Protests against U.S. President Donald Trump are planned for a dozen cities in New Mexico on Saturday, part of a mass mobilization effort at state capitals across the country and in Washington D.C.
The “Hands Off” demonstrations center around the message, “We do not consent to the destruction of our government and our economy for the benefit of Trump and his billionaire allies,” according to its website.
Rallies on Saturday will take place in Santa Fe, Ramah, Albuquerque, Taos, Gallup, Las Cruces, Portales, Socorro, Truth or Consequences, Los Lunas, Silver City and Alamogordo, according to a list of actions planned for New Mexico.
The Santa Fe action is being organized by Indivisible Santa Fe, a group of mostly women activists created in 2016 at the outset of the first Trump administration, and a chapter of larger Indivisible movement.
Santa Fe local Max Thurston, one of the co-organizers of the Santa Fe demonstration, told Source NM on Friday he joined the organization because he was looking for something meaningful to do in order to resist the Trump administration’s authoritarian attacks on immigrants, LGBTQ people and women’s rights, freedom of speech and the environment.
“You can feel really helpless and not that powerful when you’re looking at the news individually, so the whole idea of Indivisible is that it’s all about how we can organize, come together and resist this authoritarianism, fight for something we really believe in and fight for our values,” Thurston said.
Thurston, a researcher and PhD student in exercise science at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, said he was particularly affected by the Trump administration’s funding cuts for research programs.
“For me, it’s also a pretty uncertain, difficult time because I really wanted to be a scientist here in the U.S., ideally in New Mexico,” he said. “I believe in scientific institutions and, in a lot of ways, I felt like America had some of the best science in the world and now I don’t know if that’s the case.”
Thurston said there are now thousands of rallies planned for Saturday, and his group is expecting millions of people to show up.
“I think it’s true of all of the different Hands Off rallies all across the state and across the country that the movement is about bringing together a lot of different groups, really building a strong coalition of different grassroots organizations focused on lots of different topics but that all have the same goal of standing up against the ways the Trump and Musk administration is dismantling our democracy, our government and our future,” Thurston said.
Speakers at the event in Santa Fe are expected to include U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M.), Georgetown University law professor Heidi Li Feldman and EarthCare Co-Director Bianca Sapoci-Belknap.
The rally in Santa Fe is scheduled from noon to 2 p.m. on Saturday outside the New Mexico Legislature, on the east side of the Roundhouse.
Thurston said the Santa Fe rally will include people from the National Organization for Women’s local chapter, New Mexico Wild, the National Education Association’s New Mexico branch and the Democratic Party of New Mexico’s Veterans and Military Families Caucus.
The American Federation of Teachers New Mexico and Youth United for Climate Crisis Action have also sent out emails to supporters this week encouraging them to participate.
Thurston said organizers picked Saturday as the time for the protests in part because of the urgency to the harms being done by the Trump administration and the uncertainty about what happens next.
“We stand up on April 5 so that we can keep standing up on April 15, and on April 25, and keep this movement going,” he said. “This is definitely only the start.”
Austin Fisher is a journalist based in Santa Fe. He reports for Source New Mexico.