Jorge Torres paces back and forth at the Hinds Plaza outside Princeton Public Library, stirring up the group of people gathered around him. “You guys got to scream,” he implores the crowd. “Like being mad. It’s not a church; it’s a rally!”
It’s November 6th, past sundown the night after Donald Trump won the Presidential Election, and people are shouting, chanting, waving their signs in fear and in hope. A fiery man with short, dark, curly hair and clad in all black, Torres fires up the crowd: “Hey hey! ho ho! Donald Trump has got to go!”
Around 70 people stand behind broad banners in Hinds Plaza, filling the space with energy. The crowd forms a U-shape around Torres, brandishing a collection of signs: “ICE Out of Princeton,” “Alto ICE,” and “Immigrants’ Rights are Human Rights.” They are here with Resistencia en Acción New Jersey, a local immigrants’ rights organization. Resistencia organized the rally, the first demonstration in Princeton to protest Trump’s victory. “We have a president who is racist and [who] discriminates toward immigrants,” says Resistencia’s Executive Director Ana Paola Pazmiño. “We are gonna stand up and fight back.”
Resistencia is also fighting for a reason far closer to home: the organization wants Princeton’s leaders to protect the town’s migrant community against the anti-immigrant policies Trump champions. With so much to lose from a Trump presidency, Resistencia is working from the bottom up, starting from the local level to challenge systems of power, and calling on the broader community to join its efforts.
In Hinds Plaza, speeches from organizers and demonstrators recognize that this election dealt a death blow to the existing Democratic coalition, and provoke a fundamental question with which the left will have to contend over the next four years: what does building power look like in the shadow of the next Trump administration?
People come to the rally with fear about the future that Trump wants to create: a future with mass deportations, with increased policing, with violence against minorities and people in the LGBTQ+ community.
Reverend Erich Kussman, a pastor of St. Bartholomew Lutheran Church in the city of Trenton, showed up to his office in the morning to find 20 scared people at his door. “They thought they were getting deported today because Trump got elected. People don’t understand how the policies work, but they’re seeing the tears and the fear,” Kussman says.
“It’s very traumatic for a lot of folks,” he adds.
“Siempre existe el miedo,” says Fernando, a resident from Mexico living on Clay Street, part of the immigrant community in Princeton’s Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood. The fear always exists. “We are not going to feel comfortable here anymore,” he says in Spanish, voicing his fear to “go to the street, to shop or to work.”
When Pazmiño, a Hispanic woman with bright eyes and long dark hair, takes the mic, she shares a testimony of a girl who called her early that morning in tears over her undocumented parents. “It’s so hard to feel that fear your parents might be in danger,” she said, “even though she might know the language…, was raised here, [and] has a bright future.”
Yet in the roar of assent that swells after each speech, in the raw chants that organizers lead throughout the evening, in the moments of quiet when friends console one another with arms on the shoulder, the rally allows for people to fear and to grieve as a collective. For Luisa, an Ecuadorian immigrant, the rally exists so she and her neighbors can “get together with people like us so we don’t feel lonely.”
(Fernando and Luisa both declined to provide their last names.)
Speakers seek to counter the fear weighing on the crowd with stories of empowerment. Early in the rally, a middle-aged man named Juan Regalado walks up to the microphone and recounts how he avoided being separated by ICE from his wife and daughters. Pazmiño stands next to him, translating: “I was stronger. I was stronger, and thanks to God, I’m here. I’m part of the Resistencia family. I’m part of you guys, who are my family, and we’re going to be united, and we’re not going to go anywhere.” The crowd erupts in cheers, affirming his words: “No somos uno, no somos cien, somos millones, cuéntanos bien!” We are not one, we are not a hundred: we are millions. Count us right!
“From now on,” Pazmiño says as Regalado passes the mic to her, “things happen in the streets. With our community. And together.”
Although Resistencia’s rally was organized as a direct response to Trump’s win, it is in many ways as much a refutation of the Democratic Party as it is a mobilization against the Republican Party. After all, Harris, too, pledged to limit asylum opportunities for migrants, punish illegal border crossings with felony charges, and continue building Trump’s wall. Resistencia’s members have deep skepticism of the Democratic Party’s position on immigration even today. Under Biden’s presidency, they watched as ICE patrolled the town in July and detained one Princeton resident, causing shock and fear in the community.
“We can’t expect either party to protect migrants when we saw with our own eyes the callous crackdowns that were happening in Princeton under Democratic administrations at all levels of government,” says Bryce Springfield ’25, an organizer with Princeton Young Democratic Socialists of America.
Disaffected with either party and particularly apprehensive of a future under a Trump administration, speakers at the rally call immigrant communities and their allies to organize amongst themselves and push decision-makers to listen. “When we say the people save the people, what does that mean?” Torres says. “What does that mean? That we’re going to save ourselves, that no one is going to save ourselves, that no political party, not Republican, not Democrat, no one is going to save ourselves. Just us.”
“If ICE comes to this fucking town,” Torres adds, “We’re going to protect our community.”
Beyond working toward community protection, rally organizers envision building power by establishing a broad left-wing coalition in Princeton and beyond, one that bases its center of power outside of either major party. They stress the importance of mass mobilization across identities with a working-class agenda. “We cannot talk about true liberation until we talk about building a multiracial, bottom-up movement,” Springfield says.
“I’m fearful for a lot of our people being misinformed,” Pazmiño says, referring to the uncertainty in the community about how Trump will execute his deportation plans. “But I’m most hopeful that perhaps the testimonies of others will help the whole community to see this as a way to agitate and get out on the streets to make sure that our rights are heard.”
The rally’s coalition of immigrant’s rights activists, democratic socialists, progressive advocates, and concerned locals present a vision of power that challenges the Democratic Party’s operating model from the left. Given the Democrats’ bruising loss and fracturing base, organizers hope that the Party seriously contends with this vision in the four years ahead.
After embarking on a looping march through Witherspoon St., Nassau St., and Palmer Square, the crowd gathers one last time in Hinds Plaza. Speakers lead the final cheers of the night, and the rally comes to a close. The bus that drove many of Resistencias members to the rally pulls away, students walk back to the University, and town members head home. The rally has run its course, and the Plaza falls into its usual rhythms once again. The chants, speeches, and high energy at the rally dissipate.
But Resistencia has amassed a community that’s not going anywhere. If anything, their efforts are just beginning. For now, Resistencia is creating defense committees to prepare individuals for more ICE activity in the town, protect immigrants with temporary status, and host “know your rights” workshops.
“That’s our work right now,” Pazmiño says. “We’re strategizing on how to protect against what’s coming.”
As for the broader collection of organizers, some are preparing to realize the bottom-up coalition envisioned at the rally in order to mobilize changes on a larger scale. Springfield voices a will to “build working class power, build power against this racist system, this capitalist system, and all the oppressions that come out of it.”
What will come in the next four years and how far these coalitional efforts will go is uncertain. But who will be in the struggle to strengthen America’s left and launch a political challenge to Trump is clear.
“It’ll only be us,” says Vera Candiani, an Associate Professor of History and former labor union organizer. “It’ll only be us as immigrants, as workers, as women, as young people, as students, to be able to defend the rights that we have and advance our struggle to gain more power.”
Photos by Alex Norbrook.
Second Look allows for Ariel Chen and Alex Norbrook to fear and to grieve as a collective.