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The unlikely journey to the floor at the Trump rally had begun four nights earlier in a lecture hall on campus at UIC. The first meeting drew about 100 students, many of them campus leaders frustrated that their college had decided to host the Trump rally at all. They launched a “Stop Trump” Facebook page, and, over the weekend, the page had drawn about a thousand likes. That’s how I found out about the group. I wanted to tell the story of the growing national unrest about the Trump campaign through the eyes of the protesters, so I reached out to the student leaders at UIC and requested behind-the-scenes access to their protest. They agreed, inviting me to Chicago.
At that first meeting on Monday, which I did not attend, finding consensus on an actual protest plan sputtered in the lecture hall. “People had too many agendas,” UIC student Brian Geiger said later. “We didn’t get much accomplished.” There were supporters of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton and even one guy in a Ted Cruz shirt, but the students were intent on keeping the protest nonpartisan.
Students couldn’t agree how—or where—to protest. Angry over recent news of activists being physically assaulted at Trump events, some felt they shouldn’t be passive if attacked on Friday night. But others like Geiger—an African-American senior majoring in political science and an honors student at UIC—countered that non-violence was the only approach they could take. Anything else, he said, would reflect badly on them, the university and the cause. “What I’m fearful of,” he said, “is folks who are coming to this campus and want to start violence. That’s what scares me.”
But the students’ biggest concern, by far, was their own safety. Mateo Uribe Rios, a UIC senior and undocumented immigrant who came to the United States from Colombia as a child about 15 years ago, felt anxious just thinking about being on campus with a large Trump rally in the works. “I’m scared down to my bones,” Rios said. “We are the direct targets here. We—the students of color and undocumented students—are the targets of Trump’s narrative. If there’s violence, it will be focused on us.”
Looking out at the lecture hall on Monday night—at students black and Latino, Muslim and gay—Joe Iosbaker had to agree. Unlike most of the students there, he was a seasoned activist, 57 and bespectacled, with flecks of gray in his beard. As a leader in the SEIU’s Local 73, representing some 3,500 UIC employees, Iosbaker had protested for other causes many times before, and even been arrested, he said. Despite the obstacles, apparent in the lecture hall, he believed the students could find a way.
“You can organize a march so that you’re safe,” he said. “You can. You can organize it so nobody gets hurt. But it’s going to take a conscious effort.”
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JUAN ROJAS is cautious by nature. Maybe it’s the scientist in him. At 19, a sophomore at UIC, he is working toward becoming a doctor. He volunteers in Chicago public schools teaching health education. His major is neuroscience, and he bashfully acknowledges a grade point average hovering just above 3.9. “He’s an intelligent, driven person,” said friend and fellow UIC sophomore Casandra Robledo, a pre-nursing major, with brown hair and braces on her teeth. “None of us are the stereotypical protester.”
Perhaps with the exception of Miguel Del Toral, a 26-year-old graduate student and member of the Chicago Socialist Party. He is round in the middle, with bushy black hair and a beard to match. Rojas, by comparison, is a short and slim, a sliver of a man in tight jeans, cuffed at the ankle. And while Del Toral seems to shout his thoughts, Rojas is measured, his gaze steady behind rectangular glasses. The pair didn’t even know each other a few days earlier. And yet, by Thursday night, there they were-- along with Lewis and Robledo—standing at the front of a lecture hall near the UIC quad, presiding over the second meeting of the students.
“We just want to make sure we’re all on the same page,” Rojas said, to begin.
I was sitting in the fourth row, among about three dozen students, most of them Latino and African-American – a representative slice of UIC’s diverse student body. Since Monday, using Google docs and a messaging app called WhatsApp, the group had looped in roughly 60 people and begun to formulate a detailed plan. For starters, a large group of them, led by Rojas, would march from the quad to the corner of Harrison Avenue and Racine Street, just outside the arena where Trump would speak. Del Toral would oversee the portable megaphone system they were borrowing for the event and would make sure no one hijacked the microphone for their own political purposes. “I’ll get them off,” he said.
Lewis and Robledo would help oversee the group of students interested in going inside. The goal: get in line long before the doors opened at 3 p.m. so they could claim center stage, between Trump’s podium and the media’s television cameras. “We will take the floor,” Lewis said. “I’m not even concerned about that.” Rojas was thinking about an exit strategy. He wanted to make sure the students inside the arena got out – either escorted by security, or on their own before the end of the event when tensions might be most strained.
“For safety concerns,” Rojas told the group. “We don’t want to be in direct conflict with anyone. We don’t want it to be Us vs. Them. It’s about unity and respect and tolerance.”
Still, everyone in the room knew they were taking risks, which the students categorized by color to make the stakes plain. “Peacemakers,” folks on the edge of the march, were green, with little risk of problems. Marchers and those going inside were yellow and could be detained. “That doesn’t mean you’ll be charged,” Rojas clarified. “But you are acknowledging that you have that risk and you’re okay with that.” Red was the final category.
“What does red do?” an African-American female student asked.
“You’re at the front of the march,” Rojas told her. Or inside the event itself, prepared to disrupt it with peaceful chanting. “You’re at risk of being arrested,” Geiger said, putting it another way.
The woman, new to the group that night, grabbed a pen and began to sign up.
“I want to be red,” she declared.