It never made sense to me to be honest.
I may not be 20 anymore and when I was I wouldn't be interested in protests anyways, but I can't imagine the average citizen caring this much about protecting illegal immigration in their city.
I have participated in protests and righteous boycotts most of my life actually. But always peacefully and with an intent of being constructive, i.e. correcting a wrong, changing bad behavior etc.
I once participated in a quiet picket of a business we knew was discriminating against black people, Jewish people or whatever and it was the only one of its type in the area. It took just a few hours of quietly holding signs in front of the business before the owner relented and changed his policy. He probably wasn't nice to those he discriminated against, but he allowed them to do business there.
Within a year or two one of them opened their own business and that ended it entirely as an issue.
Years ago I participated in a nationwide Nestle boycott. They had been going into 3rd world countries distributing baby formula for free. The mothers used the formula until their own mother's milk dried up, and then Nestle started charging for the formula. Many could not afford it and many babies suffered severe malnutrition, probably some/maybe many died.
The boycott was hard because we had to identify the hundreds of products Nestle makes in order to boycott them, but it worked. Nestle stopped this indefensible policy. And then we could all start buying Nestle products again.
These I think are righteous protests. We knew exactly what we were protesting and why it needed to be done. And when bad behavior was corrected the offender was no longer punished.
I'm pretty sure not more than maybe one out of ten if that has any clue what they are protesting in these current riots.
I do think the left is hateful, cruel, savage, demented, anti-American to use these methods. They either participate in them or approve/encourage them, defend them. They won't denounce/condemn them.
We Patriots/MAGAs didn't organize and hold protests, let alone instigate violent riots, during the four years of a destructive, terrible Biden Administration that flooded the country with millions of these migrants--far too many of them lawless--that now need to go home.