Ariana Isabel Duckett // Editor-in-Chief
Nathan Madsen // Staff Photographer
On Saturday, Oct. 18, thousands gathered at Alameda Park for the No Kings rally hosted by Indivisible Santa Barbara.
Many different messages covered protestors’ homemade paper and cardboard signs. Some signs condemned Immigration and Customs Enforcement and authoritarianism. Others expressed support for democracy, immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, and Proposition 50 which, if passed this November, would redistrict congressional maps in the state.
Inflatable animal costumes have also become a staple of No Kings rallies following a viral video of a protestor in Portland in an inflatable frog costume being pepper-sprayed in the costume’s air vent by law enforcement.
“Only the people can save the people,” Primitiva Hernandez of 805UndocuFund told protesters. “Our liberation will never come from the systems that exploit us. It will come from us. The community that refuses to be silent, or erased.”
Other speakers included Dr. Jenna Tosh, CEO of Planned Parenthood of California Central Coast, Assemblymember Gregg Hart, Congressman Salud Carbajal, Julissa Peña of the Immigrant Legal Defense Center, and Madeline Vailhe, a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara and a UAW 4811 organizer.
“What else could we do but be out here today?” a graduate student protestor told The Bottom Line (TBL) on the condition of anonymity.
Supporting students who “are scared about losing their funding, their visa statuses” through campus resources “is not enough,” according to the graduate student.
Other graduate students in the group TBL spoke with described feeling “disrespected” and angry by cuts in funding on campus.
Tosh of Planned Parenthood of California Central Coast spoke after Hernandez against the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
The act initially took Medicaid funding from Planned Parenthood amongst many other entities. A judge banned Planned Parenthood’s defunding at the time, but the protection ended in September, according to Tosh.
“They are counting on us to be afraid, but we refuse to be bullied into silence, into perpetuation,” Tosh said. “One day, our children will ask us, when there was so much at stake for our country, what did we do?” Tosh said. “ And the only defensible answer is we did everything we could.”