For May Day, Chicago mom takes her family to a protest: ‘I have never heard of any right being won from home’

At home Friday morning, Flor Ramirez moved between chores and preparations for the afternoon May Day march — packing tamales and cleaning out the family van to make sure there was enough room for the kids plus a friend she planned to pick up. Yessari, her 8-year-old daughter, said she especially liked watching her mother figure out how they’re going to dress up for the rally.

Last year, Flor Ramirez made butterflies for Yessari and her sister Saori to wear on their heads. “The butterflies symbolize freedom,” Yessari said. This year, using a stencil and glitter, their mom painted “ICE OUT” across the girl’s cheeks, one word on each side.

Flor Ramirez wasn’t always able to join the annual May Day rallies and marches that take place on May 1, a day recognized across the globe in defense of workers’ rights and in Chicago for immigrant rights as well.

In 2006, Ramirez, who’d recently arrived in the United States from Puebla, Mexico, wanted to join the May Day immigrant rights march but didn't know anyone who could take her. She was 18 years old and working at a Chipotle in Niles, IL.

Ramirez said the manager at Chipotle laughed when she requested the day off. He told her there were other ways to help. But Ramirez wanted to go.

“Fine,” she recalled him saying. “Go, but you don’t come back.”

Back then, she said, she used to listen to El Pistolero on the radio, a program urging workers and immigrant families to show up for their rights as debate grew over a federal bill that would have criminalized immigrants without legal status.

Now, nearly two decades later, Flor Ramirez along with her husband, Armando, and their 16-year-old son, Uri and daughters Saori, 10, and Yessari, 8 attended the May Day rally and march held at Union Park.

Twenty years ago, the threat was a bill that would have criminalized immigrants without legal status. Flor Ramirez says the threat now feels greater where even people with legal status, residency or citizenship are at risk.

Like many immigrant families, the Ramirez family is split across legal status and experiences: some of them were born in Mexico, some in the United States; some carry work permits or residency, or are U.S. citizens.

Flor and her husband, Armando, did not have legal status for years before receiving temporary protection from deportation and work authorization through Deferred Action for Labor Enforcement, or DALE, a 2023 Biden-era process created for immigrant workers involved in investigations of labor violations. The future of the program is now uncertain. The Trump administration stopped processing DALE requests last year, though workers who already received deferred action may remain protected until their protections expire.

The Ramirez family arrived at Friday’s May Day march ready to make a lot of noise. Armando had fashioned home made drums from buckets he bought at Home Depot. The girls banged on tambourines while marching through Union Park. The music blared as the afternoon turned chilly and the girls bundled into blankets inside a wagon they had brought with in case they got tired.

Being at the May Day rally together with the whole family feels especially important to Ramirez this year because of what her family experienced during Operation Midway Blitz.

In the fall her son Uri, a U.S. citizen, was waiting to be picked up from school when he got a text from his older brother that federal immigration agents were at a gas station near his school. So instead of leaving through the usual exit, Uri left through a different one, hoping the agents wouldn’t see him.

Flor later told him he had nothing to worry about.

“Mom,” he told her, “have you seen my face?”

“I was born here but…I still sort of felt afraid,” Uri said. “I still felt like I would be taken away from my family, my friends, my own home."

For the people who ask ‘ What is the point of marching on May Day? What has been accomplished?’ Flor Ramirez has an answer: “I have never heard of any right being won from home or from under the bed,” she said. That is the lesson she wants to pass down to her kids: that silence will not protect them.

If her children learn anything from marching on May Day, she wants it to be the belief that they belong here, they do not have to make themselves small to be safe and they are not alone.

“Even if they don’t want us, our roots are already here. We are already a well-planted tree.”