Feature Archives

On October 4, the Trump administration dismissed protests and made a formal decision to open 725,500 acres of public lands and mineral estate across California’s Central Coast and the Bay Area to new oil and gas drilling and fracking. The public lands the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has earmarked for leasing are in the counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, Fresno, Merced, Monterey, San Benito, San Joaquin, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and Stanislaus. The move will end a more than five-year-old moratorium on leasing federal public land and mineral estate in the state to oil companies.

Trump tried and failed to keep his September 17 Silicon Valley fundraiser location secret, putting out misleading information to get protestors to go to the wrong place or simply give up. Then, he misused secret service and local police to try to block protestors from the only road with access to the Palo Alto Republican fundraiser. Despite his efforts, protesters managed to discover the true location as a home owned by Sun MicroSystems co-founder Scott McNealy and created a spectacle that the presidential motorcade and shuttle buses with rich donors would see.

Climate Strikes began on September 20, three days out from the United Nation's climate emergency summit in New York, and continued to September 27. As young climate strikers have shown, there is huge power in sustained action week after week to match the scale of the climate emergency. Millions walked out from home, work, school or university to declare a climate emergency and to show politicians what action in line with climate science and justice means.

Angry activists mobilized on August 16, blocking the cafeteria entrance at Palantir Technologies' headquarters in Palo Alto. They were protesting the $20 billion data-mining company's ICE Investigative Case Management contract that enables Immigration and Custom Enforcement to track the every move of undocumented immigrants. After Palantir announced on August 20 that they would be renewing their ICE contract, the Coalition to Close the Concentration Camps Bay Area called for an emergency mass mobilization.

As separatists and government-backed forces battle for control of the Yemeni capital, innocent civilians continue to suffer. On August 16, Yemeni-Americans and allies gathered in front of San Francisco's Federal Building where they called on Speaker Nancy Pelosi to lead the House in progressive foreign policies as regards the war in Yemen. They want the House-Senate conference on the National Defense Authorization Act to include the Smith-Khanna amendment to end all U.S. participation in the Saudi-led war in Yemen and the Malinowski amendment to stop bomb sales to Saudi Arabia.

In response to reports that CEO of SoulCycle and Equinox Stephen Ross will be holding a fundraiser for the Donald Trump reelection campaign, members of the LGBT community launched a boycott of these businesses with a protest in front of Soul Cycle's Harvey Milk Plaza location on August 7 in San Francisco. Demonstrators said they are angry that the owner of the fitness center chains, who also owns the Miami Dolphins, is supporting a racist, homophobic, and sexist president. They are calling on current members to cancel their memberships and decline to renew them.

Plans for a mass roundup of migrant families that have received deportation orders, announced on June 21, set off protests throughout the nation as Americans reacted in horror. Outraged particularly by eye witness reports of mistreatment and deaths of migrant children held in barbarous conditions, everyday citizens joined long-time activists to say "never again" to incarceration based on race or citizenship. People throughout the Bay Area and across the nation demonstrated June 22 through July 5. Indybay has coverage from many of these demos. Another round of protests will start with an international day of action on July 12.