‘My father would be crying’: Hundreds protest Trump at downtown Spokane march

Hundreds gathered in the snow by Spokane’s Big Red Wagon Monday to protest President Donald Trump’s sweeping and rapid actions to reform immigration enforcement, dismantle diversity programs and oversight of police, and more.

Taking advantage of the Presidents Day holiday to gather in the park at noon Monday, organizers argued the protest was an opportunity to recognize and organize the power – not of the president, but of residents.

The Residents Day March circled the Spokane River, marching with a police escort in one lane of the street northward on Monroe before looping back down the Washington Street tunnel under Riverfront Park. The event, one of at least two protests scheduled in the city Monday, was organized by over 30 primarily progressive advocacy groups, including Spokane Community Against Racism, Latinos En Spokane, Spokane Pride, the Smith-Barbieri Progressive Fund and the county Democratic Party.

Pui-Yan Lam, a sociology professor with Eastern Washington University, decried the White House’s threats to withdraw federal funding from schools if they use race in numerous ways, including for scholarships, administrative support and housing.

The letter outlining the Trump administration’s threats also highlighted race-based preferential admission – which was already found unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2023. It also criticized “toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism,’ ” wrote Craig Trainor, acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights for the U.S. Department of Education in a Feb. 14 “Dear Colleague” letter.

“Trump and the far-right want to destroy the education system because they are afraid of the liberatory power of education,” said Lam, who is an immigrant from Hong Kong. “Authoritarian regimes will not tolerate an education that teaches students how to think for themselves – they don’t want that for girls and women, and they don’t want that for working class students.”

Pat Castaneda, executive director of immigrant resource organization Manzanita House, and Mark Finney of Thrive International, which provides transitional housing for refugees arriving in Spokane, both spoke to the Trump administration’s freeze on all new refugee arrivals and renewed crackdown on undocumented immigrants.

“I refuse to watch my fellow immigrants live in fear in the shadows,” said Castaneda, who is an immigrant from Venezuela. “Every day I see immigrants raising families, working hard, starting businesses. We make this city stronger.”

Evee Polanski, a Mexican immigrant who came with her family to the U.S. in 1991 as a child without legal documentation and who was protected by the Obama-era DACA policy before receiving legal residency, described the fear she experienced as an undocumented immigrant.

“I was that child who came home to her parents being gone because they got picked up by ICE,” Polanski said. “I was also that adult that grew up afraid to go to work when ICE raids were happening in Nevada, because that meant I might not come home to my own two children.”

“Immigrant children are not criminals,” she added. “I am not a criminal. You know who is a criminal? The current administration.”

Kurtis Robinson, executive director of post-incarceration aid organization Revive Center for Returning Citizens and former president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, urged those in attendance to expand their activism beyond Monday’s march and to focus their attention locally, not just to D.C.

“Where’s the work being done here at home?” Robinson asked. “We have a lot of work to do, and some of that work is right here.”

Attendees included college students and parents with young children who didn’t have school Monday, at least two people who are among the many who believe they were illegally fired last week from their federal jobs, public educators, activists and several who said they had never participated in a protest before.

Kirk Phillips, who said this was the second protest he attended recently to express his displeasure with the Trump administration, hoped that Monday’s event would put pressure on elected leaders like Rep. Michael Baumgartner to “actively put forward their constituents’ interests more than they’re doing right now.”

Nan Lubbert, a member of the local chapter of Raging Grannies, pushed her rollator through the slush as she tried to keep up with the march.

“We literally have felons and perverts and rich billionaires who want to get more billions in our government,” Lubbert said in frustration. “Our fathers fought in World War 2 – come on! My gosh, my father would be crying, or just go back into his grave, if he could see.”