More than 2,000 people lined the sidewalks of upper State Street on Saturday in the latest local protest against the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Trump administration.
The demonstration was hosted by Indivisible Santa Barbara, which hosts weekly protests against the Trump administration. Saturday’s event was part of a nationwide weekend of action against ICE, with more than 1,000 protests held across the country. The Santa Barbara protest saw exceptional turnout, with participants galvanized by the January 7 murder of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.
“Her last words were like, ‘I’m not mad at you.’ And he just shot her,” said Lukas Schwirner, a Santa Barbara resident. “Our administration allows those kinds of people into positions of power and supports them, without any input from us, from the people …. Instead, [Trump will] just do whatever he wants. He’s the king, and he’ll let maniacs with guns kidnap and deport people, I guess.”
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The protest was planned to occupy the stretch of State Street between Hope Avenue and Hitchcock Way, but the crowd was so numerous that it spread onto adjacent blocks. Passing drivers honked their horns in support as demonstrators held up signs condemning ICE, Trump, and the recent military raid on Venezuela.
Fernando Calderon, who has lived in Santa Barbara for more than 30 years, said the attack on Venezuela is connected to ICE’s violence. He said the abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro reminded him of American intervention in Vietnam, Iraq, and Latin America.
“People don’t want to leave their country just for the sake of leaving their country. They’re forced to leave their country because of, especially in Latin America, what the United States has done,” Calderon said.
Santa Barbara County community members have long been impacted by immigration raids, but since Trump began his second term, detentions and deportations have accelerated. More than 1,200 residents of Santa Barbara, S.L.O., and Ventura counties were abducted by ICE in 2025, according to the 805 Rapid Response Network, a community defense network led by 805 Undocufund.
Mallory Koenig said she wanted people to remember that the murder of Renee Good is the latest incident of violence by ICE agents, not the first. She held up a sign completely covered in handwritten names.
“These are the names of everyone that we know of that were killed by ICE in 2025. It’s 32 people,” she said. “I would like to draw attention to all of these names because a lot of these names go unnoticed, and were in detention, and their families didn’t know about it until much later.”
Sydney Burgoyne, a local high school student, said she was inspired to protest against ICE after “seeing how it’s affecting my classmates and how last year, they had to stay inside and couldn’t go to school because they were afraid that them or their parents or their grandparents were going to be deported.”
Although the protest drew a noticeably older crowd, Burgoyne and other youth in attendance expressed a desire for more of their peers to get involved with political action. “There’s a lot of people who ignore it and don’t want to think about it, but this is our future,” said 15-year-old Wyatt Ginder. “This is the world we’re going to live in.”
Representatives from Indivisible Santa Barbara hope the momentum continues. They will continue to host protests every Saturday at 10 a.m. at the Upper State Street location, said community liaison Myra Paige, and plan to hold a “No Kings” rally sometime this spring.
“I understand that it’s scary and you think that you’re one person, but you can do a lot,” said Alicia Edwards, an organizer for the Santa Barbara chapter of Democratic Socialists of America. “And there’s a lot of community support. There’s a lot of nonprofit organizations like SBResiste, 805 Undocufund. Just get involved in your local politics. You know, elections are coming up too. I just encourage everybody, whatever part you can play, there is a role for you in this.”
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