Thousands of people attended May Day protests across the country Thursday in response to the Trump administration’s controversial moves against immigrants and federal workers over its first 100 days.

       Scores of people filled the streets in cities including Los Angeles, New York City, Denver, Chicago and Washington, DC, for May Day – or International Workers’ Day – to protest what they call an assault on immigrants, workers and students exercising their right to free speech.

       The protests are organized under the banner of the “50501” movement – short for 50 protests, 50 states, 1 movement – which states it supports “the fight to uphold the Constitution and end executive overreach.”

       “Trump and his billionaire profiteers are trying to create a race to the bottom – on wages, on benefits, on dignity itself,” the movement’s website says. “This May Day we are fighting back. We are demanding a country that puts our families over their fortunes – public schools over private profits, healthcare over hedge funds, prosperity over free market politics.”

       New York City’s first May Day protest on Thursday brought together several causes, with chants of “Free Palestine,” signs calling for the freedom of detained Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil and worker’s rights signs reading, “Trump: Hands Off Our Unions.”

       “Trump has poor and working-class people forgetting who our enemies are,” an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation said to the large crowd gathered in New York City’s Union Square. “Our enemies are not international students that organize on their campus. Our enemies are not undocumented workers that contribute to their communities, that pay taxes and can’t get services. Our enemies are not workers that work for corporations.”

       “No – this racist, sexist, anti-worker, homophobic, xenophobic, transphobic system is our enemy,” the organizer said as the crowd cheered in response.

       A group of roughly 150 people marched a little over 20 blocks from Union Square to the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, where the rallies continued on its front entrance steps.

       Demonstrators chanted and cheered while carrying Palestinian flags and signs that read, “People demand: Stop the deportations.” Multiple speakers spoke about the government’s targeting of immigrants and the US funding to Israel for weapons and military equipment as the civilian death toll in Gaza continues to rise.

       During a second energetic May Day rally in New York City, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told thousands of attendees, as estimated by CNN crew members, “When they see us gather in the streets,” Washington politicians get “very afraid.”

       She pointed to the large gatherings of people rallying for May Day in cities across the country, mentioning Sen. Bernie Sanders was at a rally with thousands of people in Philadelphia.

       The Vermont senator spoke Thursday at City Hall in Philadelphia alongside labor unions and immigrant rights groups demonstrating against the current administration’s recent policies and decisions.

       “Brothers and sisters, we tell these greedy oligarchs this country belongs to all of us, not the billionaire class,” Sanders said.

       Protesters waiting in anticipation for Sanders’ speech told CNN they have concerns, including Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s deportation and the administration’s threats against students like Tufts University PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was snatched by masked immigration officers in broad daylight.

       “I’m in distress,” Kate Overath-Speck told CNN. “I came out and demonstrated during his first regime, like every weekend, there was something to protest. But now we’re not supposed to be protesters. We’re supposed to be protectors of democracy, the rule of law, the US constitution.”

       Following the Philadelphia rally, 70 demonstrators were arrested for obstructing a highway after officers issued multiple warnings to clear the roadway, the Philadelphia Police Department said Thursday night. Protesters were “inspired by the actions of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the March on Washington, and Dr. Martin Luther King and the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike,” the Philadelphia AFL-CIO said in a news release.

       “What we saw today, from the large crowds who rallied with us at City Hall, to the over 50 leaders and activists who were arrested with me earlier this evening, makes it abundantly clear that workers in Philly will not sit back while our rights are stripped away by billionaires like Donald Trump and Elon Musk,” Philadelphia AFL-CIO President Daniel Bauder said.

       As part of her speech, Ocasio-Cortez criticized the mass cuts to the federal workforce since the start of the Trump administration, along with the crackdown on immigration enforcement.

       “We’ve seen our federal workers laid off, cuts across the board,” she told the crowd. “We can see individuals calling for a ceasefire getting locked up,” she said, alluding to protest organizers like Khalil.

       50501, which describes itself as a “decentralized” movement with events organized by independent volunteers, originated from a Reddit forum launched on January 25 that gave rise to a wave of nationwide protests led by grassroots organizations following Trump’s inauguration. What began as an online movement quickly spilled into the streets, with at least four major demonstrations in the past four months.

       Before the May Day protests, the most recent came on April 19 when crowds of people attended over 80 protests at state capitols, courthouses and city halls in several states to oppose what organizers describe as President Donald Trump’s executive overreach, including deportations without due process, the dismantling of federal agencies and threats to higher education.

       In downtown Los Angeles, vast numbers of people rallied and chanted in opposition to the Trump administration and what speakers described as efforts to undermine Black and immigrant communities.

       “The real parasites of this country are those billionaires that are destroying this country’s institutions,” said Aquilina Soriano Versoza, the founder of the Pilipino Workers Center.

       The crowd broke into multiple chants: “When I say workers, you say power! When I say immigrants, you say power! When I say union, you say yes!”

       “Enough with the senseless attacks on our brothers and sisters who came to this country seeking a better life,” said Carmen Roberts, vice president of SEIU Local 2015, the largest union in California representing over half a million long-term care workers.

       “Let us choose unity over division,” she said, adding “Sí, se puede,” Spanish for “Yes, it can be done,” a nod to the rallying cry of the farm workers movement led by César E. Chávez, who fought for fair wages, humane treatment and safer working conditions for California’s farm workers through nonviolent marches, boycotts and fasts.

       Similar crowds made their way through the streets Washington, DC, where the wife of Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was wrongly deported to El Salvador last month, spoke to demonstrators.

       “My husband was illegally detained, abducted and disappeared, thrown away to die in one of the most dangerous prisons in El Salvador with no due process because of an error,” Jennifer Vasquez Sura said as the crowd responded with chants of “shame.”

       “This pain is indescribable. My children … have been left to live in a silence of their (father’s) absence, and they miss him more than anything,” she added. “Stop playing political games with my husband’s life.”

       The Trump administration has taken extraordinary measures to crack down on immigration, aggressively pressuring Immigration and Customs Enforcement to pick up the pace of migrant arrests and touting mass deportation plans. The recent crackdown has included the wrongful deportation of Abrego Garcia. On Tuesday, Trump acknowledged he could secure the return of Garcia, but refuses to do so.

       Illinois Rep. Delia Catalina Ramirez, the daughter of Guatemalan immigrants, also spoke to DC protesters.

       “We understand that this president wants to divide us. He wants to pit us against each other,” Ramirez said.

       “But look around, friends. We are Black, we are brown, we are Asian, we are Arab, we are Muslim, we are Jewish, we are White, we are working class and we are congresspeople saying, ‘enough is enough.’”

       Ramirez pointed to mobilization and actions such as the May Day protests as “the only thing that will stop fascism.”

       “This is what resistance looks like,” she said. “They’re going to try their best to continue to divide us. But this is a moment where it doesn’t matter if you come from Colombia, Jamaica, Venezuela, Poland, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, Mexico. If you’re coming from Afghanistan, from Gaza, we all come together now.”

       The protests Thursday are part of a partnership with the group May Day Strong, Gloriann Sahay, the co-founder and digital director of Political Revolution PAC, told CNN.

       “We will not stand by as this administration kidnaps our neighbors, tramples our rights, jails judges, harms people in our marginalized communities, and turns the evil Project 2025 into a reality. When the government attacks even one person, they are attacking every American,” Sahay said.

       The protests come two days after Trump marked 100 days in office. In that short period, he has moved to upend the world order by instituting tariffs that threaten global trade; dismantling the administrative state under the Department of Government Efficiency’s slapdash cuts; rolling back protections for transgender people; and exercising executive power with disdain for checks and balances.

       Trump’s 41% approval rating is the lowest for any newly elected president at 100 days dating back at least to Dwight Eisenhower over six decades ago – including Trump’s own first term, according to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS. Approval of Trump’s handling of the presidency is down 4 points since March, and 7 points lower than it was in late February. Just 22% say they strongly approve of Trump’s handling of the job, a new low, and about twice as many say they strongly disapprove (45%).

       Trump’s first presidency was met with immediate mass protests in the form of the Women’s March following Inauguration Day in January 2017. The second time around, protests were slower to develop on a significant scale until more recently.

       The “Hands Off” protests on April 5 targeted both Trump and billionaire Elon Musk in response to what the organizers called a “hostile takeover” and attack on American rights and freedoms.

       Nearly 600,000 people had signed up to attend the events, some of which took place in major cities like London and Paris, according to Indivisible, one of the organizations leading the movement.

       Then on April 19, the 50501 protests gathered across the US in a similar show of disapproval for the Trump presidency’s actions, with one of they key concerns of that protest being Abrego Garcia.

       Hundreds of “Tesla Takedown” demonstrations have also taken place in the US, Canada and Europe as activists ramp up their opposition to Musk’s efforts to slash federal government staffing and budgets through DOGE.