May Day Action by Hundreds of Protestors Slows Oakland Airport
May Day participants gather at the ILWU Local 6 hall ahead of the OAK action
On May Day, hundreds of protesters descended on Oakland International Airport (OAK). Their demands: to abolish ICE, end US wars (including stopping the shipment of military cargo to Israel), and tax the rich. As a protest of over 150 on foot at Terminal 1 reached a crescendo, another hundred protesters inched past the terminal in a four-lane car caravan, honking horns and displaying messages. News camera crews captured some of the excitement.
OAK is home to a FedEx terminal that ships military cargo to Israel, making the airport the subject of the Oakland People’s Arms Embargo Campaign, of which East Bay DSA is a member. Terminal 1 is also the ticketing location of Delta Airlines, which deported Liam Conejo Ramos. Finally, it is the site of labor struggle involving airport workers organized by SEIU-USWW.
The OAK action coincided with another, at SFO, where SEIU-USWW members working without a contract led a demonstration that resulted in 25 arrests. (A third airport action took place later in the day in San Diego.) It was organized in less than a month, led by East Bay DSA, along with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) and Indivisible East Bay, with support from leaders of the Arms Embargo Campaign, such as the Palestinian Youth Movement and Arab Resource and Organizing Center. Many other community and labor organizations participated, including contingents from ILWU local 6, Oakland teachers, and Bay Area Labor for Palestine.
ILWU Local 6 Hosts a Pre-Action Meeting
Nearly 350 people, a third of them DSA members, met up in the morning at the ILWU Local 6 union hall, a few blocks from the airport entrance. We heard from speakers about May Day, the struggle of OAK workers, and about our three demands. A statement of support was also read from Angela Davis, who apologized for not being able to make it.
Grace Martinez, statewide deputy director with ACCE, a co-leader in planning the event, reflected that the numbers exceeded our turnout goal. “There were people who had been in the movement for a very long time,” she said, “but for many, including many of our members, this was their first May Day – and their first protest. That was very powerful.”
An East bay DSA volunteer talks to a passerby about the action outside OAK Airport Terminal 1 (Matt Takaichi photo)
The Action at Terminal 1
The action at Terminal 1 kicked off when the first busload of people arrived from the ILWU hall. We wanted to let airport workers and passengers know through our banners, chanting, and flyers why this action was happening at the airport. By the time the second busload arrived, over 150 people were participating on foot.
Our signs, flyers, and chants proclaimed our overall immediate demands - tax the rich, stop US wars, abolish ICE - and also educated people about the fact that there’s an ongoing campaign to stop the shipment of military cargo through OAK (via FedEx) to Israel. An August 2025 study from the Palestinian Youth Movement found that 16% of Lockheed Martin military cargo bound for Israel passes through OAK - with over 250 military shipments to Israel from January to August 2025 alone.
This demonstration came a few weeks after a car caravan organized by the Oakland People’s Arms Embargo campaign, and the addition of an on-foot rally made our action an escalation and a reminder to the airport, which is governed by the Oakland Port Commission (appointed by famed anti-war politician and Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee), that business as usual will continue to be disrupted so long as military cargo flows through OAK. The action felt even more powerful when we saw our comrades in the car caravan shut down the only road into the airport, moving slowly enough that our banner holders were able to walk in front of them.
One of our coalition partners, Nancy Latham, a member of Indivisible East Bay’s steering committee, recalled waiting for the caravan at Terminal 1. “The moment they turned the corner,” she said, “they looked like a bunch of huge animals ready to stampede. And then as they drove toward those of us standing outside the terminal, it was as if two tributaries were flowing together. We all felt a surge of power to have this other group meet us. It was a peak experience.”
Demonstrators, including East Bay DSA members, rally outside Oakland Terminal 1 (credit: Matt Takaichi photo for Bay Area Current)
The View from the Car Caravan
To prepare for the caravan, May Day organizers incorporated the lessons learned from the Oakland People’s Arms Embargo caravan two weeks before, including preparing for the possibility of arrest. While we did not plan to disobey authorities, confronting the possibility of arrest focused participants on the risks and heightened personal security necessary in these times of authoritarian surveillance. After all, airports are among the heavily surveilled environments in the country. We secured our phones and conducted our chats in Signal, good practices for all activists. We had caravan training sessions with East Bay DSA members a few days prior to May Day and during the pre-action training at the ILWU hall.
Before getting into our cars, we practiced on foot the formation we would deploy. We had over 60 cars ready and able to join the caravan, each with a driver and at least one “co-pilot” to monitor the Signal chat. The cars were decorated in car chalk proclaiming “Abolish ICE”, “Stop US Wars”, “Tax The Rich”, and “No Killer Cargo Thru OAK”.
This intensive preparation led to the execution of a wildly successful caravan. The key tactic was having four lead cars, with the co-pilots in constant communication, along with a police liaison in the middle of the formation, and a rear car providing updates from there.
Make it stand out
CBS News footage of demonstrators taking the street in front of the car caravan at OAK
When we reached the point where four through-lanes emerged, we slowed to two miles an hour in four columns and proceeded to the terminal area. As we approached Terminal 1, we were greeted with raucous cheers and sign waving. We responded with car horns and fists in the air out of the car windows. Suddenly, people carrying three banners emerged from the crowd, took the street, and led us through the airport on foot. Horns and cheering continued. It was exhilarating and powerful. The sheriffs decided to intervene by segregating the last third of the caravan into the far left lane reserved for car shares. So now the caravan was slowing traffic in that area as well.
It took the caravan 40 minutes to snake through the airport. We were able to stay in formation across all the lanes and keep our speed at 2 mph until the entire caravan cleared the airport. By then, the sheriffs had blocked off the two closest exits leading back to the terminal.
No worries. With the Terminal 1 rally concluded, we cheered our victory and drove back to the union hall.
The East Bay DSA chapter contingent before the Oakland Sin Fronteras march and rally
The road to May Day 2026
Complementing the traditional afternoon rally and march by the Oakland Sin Fronteras coalition, the morning airport action marked a structure test and turning point in the coalescence of progressive and working class East Bay organizations around demands and tactics that we can build on over the coming two years. Getting to this point was the work of many months by East Bay DSA’s Fighting the Oligarchy campaign.
The campaign, voted East Bay DSA’s top priority at our June 2025 convention, began by organizing in solidarity with the Federal Unionists Network. It was an important goal of the campaign to help the FUN’s Bay Area Hub grow their ranks and develop their organizing capacities and reach. By the early Fall, that goal was well advanced, through a variety of means that included regular canvasses of federal workers at workplaces in Oakland, Richmond and San Francisco.
Another important campaign goal, however, was focused more broadly on the growing mass resistance to the Trump regime:
“Shape the politics of East Bay resistance: Cohere the growing mass movement in the East Bay to fight the oligarchy and incipient fascism by providing support and leadership, democratic organizational practices, and a political analysis that this is a fight in solidarity with the working class against capitalism, not with the Democratic against the Republican party.”
Since Labor Day, the Fight the Oligarchy campaign turned our focus to becoming a valued partner of Bay Area resistance organizations and coalitions.
We met with the Alameda Labor Council and SEIU 1021, proposing a series of “May Day in the Time of Trump” political education and organizing trainings, which both organizations endorsed, along with ACCE, Bay Resistance, the FUN and several more unions. The first event covered the history of May Day, and brought together a panel of partner organizational leaders who spoke to their vision for using this May Day to build power toward May Day 2028. The second featured Eric Blanc speaking to the Lessons of Minneapolis, followed by a table discussion and organizing training.
At the national level, one of our co-chairs was actively engaged in MayDayStrong, and in the NLC May Day committee. Locally, we focused on several key centers of resistance activity in the East Bay: Bay Resistance (a coalition led by numerous labor and community organizations), ACCE and Indivisible East Bay. Through building relationships and showing up to do work, we proved ourselves to be good leaders and organizers in the final months of 2025, at No Kings in October, and a People over Billionaires action at the homes of several SF billionaires, led by ACCE. This resulted in our being included in the planning committees for No Kings 3 and the Bay Area’s MayDayStrong solidarity school.
With partners convened by Bay Resistance, we planned a February 27 “train the trainer” event geared to turning people out to the solidarity school, and a solidarity school in San Francisco attended by about 1,000 people. East Bay DSA contributed two trainers at the solidarity school, including co-leading a training for union members, which was focused on organizing No Kings participants to take action on May Day. The planning for the OAK action began at these regional convenings, with East Bay membership organizations, primarily DSA, ACCE and Indivisible, taking on the challenge of quickly planning the OAK action.
Internal Organizing
With more than 2,000 members and dozens of active chapter projects spread across four counties, it took work to coordinate and get everyone on the same page about shared priorities in our chapter, even for a big event like May Day.
Over the last couple of years we’ve worked at improving our ability to turn out to protests en masse - first by establishing rapid response endorsements and turnout infrastructure for Palestine solidarity work after October 7, and more recently by calling and planning our own actions, like our solidarity march and rally with Minneapolis in Oakland on January 23.
By late February, it was clear that East Bay DSA would be playing a major role in making May Day big in the Bay this year, and a core group sprang into action to get organized internally. We began meeting in late March, setting a goal of 200 East Bay DSA members committing to not work on May Day. Our initial group of ten members from different chapter projects eventually grew to include nearly twenty actively planning East Bay DSA’s roles in the OAK action as well as the Oakland Sin Fronteras rally and march. We coalesced on the demands we wanted to center, brought those back to our coalition partners, made a communications and turnout plan, held a chapter leaders’ meeting to incorporate our May Day asks into their organizing, and held a large community meeting on April 28 to get final preparations in place. All of this meant that dozens of chapter members from several different committees and campaigns helped organize hundreds of people to take action on May Day.
What comes next
We aspire to play an even bigger role in making sure that May Day actions disrupt the flow of capital next year. That means both continuing to build coalition relationships and getting even more organized as a chapter to be able to put forward clear demands and plan significant actions.
Our proposed mechanism for doing so (subject to approval at our annual convention on June 7) is establishing a May Day Working Group that will work all year to identify potential opportunities for mass and escalating actions, especially workplace actions. This group will be structured explicitly to bring together leaders from different chapter projects, maximizing our reach and coordination. The hope is that this will put us on an even stronger footing as we look towards May Day 2028.
This approach is consistent with the national labor priority established by the DSA NPC encouraging chapters to organize toward actions on May Day 2028. The resolution calls for a “2026-27 strategic plan that may add detail, scope, timelines, staff time allocation, budget guidance, and concrete goals to these priorities [including preparing for May Day 2028].”
Meanwhile, several of us will be in St. Louis at the end of May with our local partners, and many DSA members from around the country, to learn and plan together, anticipating major provocations and mass resistance to come.
We’ll go to St. Louis with a new sense of what’s possible. As a structure test, the OAK action exceeded our expectations. ACCE’s Martinez said, “The whole point was to have an assessment of where we were as a movement, a coalition and organizations. While the May Day action came together in just three weeks, it was the culmination of a series of escalating actions that we pulled off together going back to last Fall.” Now, she added, “May Day is becoming more real for a lot of people.”
As one of our members, Eileen T, explained after returning from an exhilarating May Day visit to Chicago, “May Day is a distress signal. It can come at any time.” When it does, we aim to be prepared to fight back and protect our working class communities.