HandsOff Rally at Capitol, Saturday April 5
April 01, 2025
Joint Announcement by Sacramento Region Grassroots Organizations
(From press release)
WHAT: Mass Mobilization to Stop the Trump/Musk Corruption and Power Grab
WHEN: April 5, 2025 11 a.m.
WHERE: State Capitol West Steps, Sacramento [and in multiple outlying areas*]
On April 5, local grassroots organizations from around the Sacramento region are calling on all people concerned about the direction of our country to join the 50501 Picnic Protest in tandem with the national Hands Off! mass rally to protest the Trump-Musk billionaire takeover and the Republican assault on our freedoms and our communities.
Events across the country, in major cities and small towns in every state, will show that the people—the majority—are taking action to stop the corruption and power grab.
Why we’re mobilizing on April 5th
We are facing a national crisis. Our democracy, our livelihoods, and our rights are all on the line as Trump and Musk execute their illegal takeover.
- They’re dismantling Social Security and Medicare—forcing seniors and disabled people to jump through burdensome hoops to try to thwart access to the benefits they’ve already paid into.
- They’re handing trillions to billionaires—while forcing the rest of us to pay higher prices for food, rent, and healthcare.
- They’re gutting protections for working people—so payday lenders, banks, and credit card companies can scam people with zero consequences.
- They’re assaulting our communities and our rights—targeting veterans, kids, seniors, farmers, immigrants, transgender people, and political opponents.
- They won’t stop there.
This is not just corruption. This is not just mismanagement. This is a hostile takeover.
This is the moment where we say NO. No more looting, no more stealing, no more billionaires raiding our government while working people struggle to survive.
The lawlessness, cruelty, and corruption has gone too far. We reject their hate-filled efforts to divide us, and on April 5, we unite to say: Hands Off!
- Hands Off Our Democracy!
- Hands Off Our Health Care!
- Hands Off Social Security!
- Hands Off Our Data!
- Hands Off Public Schools!
- Hands Off Our Bodies!
- Hands Off Our Wallets!
- Hands Off Public Lands!
Our Demands
- We demand an end to the billionaire takeover and rampant lawlessness and corruption of the Trump administration.
- We demand an end to slashing federal funds for Medicaid and Social Security;
- We demand an end to dismantling the federal government that serves us and protects our health, food and water and fights climate change;
- We demand an end to siphoning money off working people to fund tax breaks for billionaires.
- We demand an end to divisive policies which attack vulnerable groups such as immigrants, LGBTQ+ and non-Christian people, and seek to erase the contributions of women and people of color and dismantle the civil rights gains of recent decades.
The power is in your hands. Join us at the Capitol on April 5!
* [Details on outlying events available at: https://www.mobilize.us/handsoff/?page=1&per_page=25&tag_ids=2605]
The HandsOff message will be loud and clear in our outlying areas as well, thanks to resolute activists in
Auburn * Calaveras * Chico * Grass Valley * Jackson * Lakeport * Marysville * Merced * Modesto * Oakhurst * Quincy * Roseville * Rio Vista * Stockton * Woodland
Hand’s off!
Posted by: Stephanie Reese | April 04, 2025 at 06:48 PM
This will be a great song to get everybody singing this weekend:
Don't you touch
Don't get near
Don't take me for a fool
Make no mistake
No give and take
I'm too good for you
So keep your hands off
Private property
Hands off, oh oh
Keep your hands off
Private property
Hands off me
Hands off
Keep your hands off me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsTYdjAfDs
Posted by: South of Davis | April 04, 2025 at 11:11 PM
Have fun preaching to each other's choirs. There is so much to do at a local level where you might make a difference. These rallies, these chants, they go nowhere. But have fun with your friends, instead renting an asphalt truck and filling in potholes in Davis -- necessary since the City is blowing the budget on bottomless pits.
Posted by: Alan C. Miller | April 05, 2025 at 10:42 AM
Hands off DOGE,
Hands off ICE,
Hands off Musk,
let them do their job.
Posted by: Keith | April 05, 2025 at 03:07 PM
Keith, the last time the current administration came up, I pointed out that it is:
"violating court orders and the constitution, deporting people who are here legally or preventing them from coming because of their speech alone, dismantling agencies that the public relies on and indiscriminately and illegally laying off thousands of qualified workers (many of whom had to be hastily called back because they were needed or because a judge ordered it), cutting Social Security services and crafting a budget that can only be balanced by dramatically cutting Medicaid (which will affect millions of Americans and cause hospitals to close), tariffs that will hurt business and raise prices [this has become even more obvious in this past week, especially the tanking of the stock market!], cutting off funding for scientific and medical research, including halting in-process medical trials, all while insisting that the uber-wealthy need tax cuts."
So I ask again, are you OK with all of that? Is that the job you want DOGE, ICE, and Musk (and Trump?) to do? I kept asking before, but you never answered.
Posted by: Roberta L. Millstein | April 05, 2025 at 05:58 PM
As I have mentioned many times I'm not a Republican or Democrat and hate them equally since both parties (and pretty much everyone in politics) just try and suck as much money as they can fron taxpayers to make their pollitically connected friends rich while speding as little as they can to buy votes.
As a California native (who had an openly gay roommate when I lived in SF) almost everyone I know is a registered Democrat and I think that most of them must be reading the same "news" (aka partisan spin) sources as Roberta.
When left reports that Trump is "deporting people who are here legally" the right of center will report that Trump is "deporting MS13 gang mambers who have killed multiple people".
It is also funny that the left says that "Trump is for Billionaires" when most Billionaires are left of center (and are funding stuff like this to keep the NGO cash flowing)
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/geofenced-every-event-democrats-caught-staging-another-inorganic-color-revolution
Like Alan I wish more people would worry less about what other people think and work with them to make the city (and world) better (funny Alan mentioned the "asphalt truck", last month I bought a "bag" of asphalt at Home Depot and hammered it into a couple small pot holes near my house...
Posted by: South of Davis | April 06, 2025 at 09:03 AM
Actually, these days I'm not reading media so much as I am reading the people who follow the courts and who post the actual court rulings, so I know that there is no spin. And so that is how I know that courts have ruled that Trump violated court orders (whether someone will get contempt of court for this is TBD), it's how I know that people who were not convicted of any crime were deported and at least one of those people have been order to be returned to the U.S. (and so far the administration is resisting that too), it's how I know that the administration has been ordered to reinstate people that it fired illegally, etc.. etc. Anyone who wants to know what's going on, right now most of the action is in the courts.
And I follow the Senate and House, too, so I know who is voting for billionaire tax cuts (most of the Republicans) and who isn't (most of the Democrats, though they aren't taking as strong a stand as I would like -- I'm not a big fan of that party either).
These days, you can get a lot of info straight from the source without relying on anyone's spin. Not everything, but a lot.
Posted by: Roberta L. Millstein | April 06, 2025 at 11:12 AM
P.S. and in the courts, the Trump administration has basically admitted that they deported people without knowing that they actually had gang affiliations. Of course what they say in the press and on Truth Social is very different.
Posted by: Roberta L. Millstein | April 06, 2025 at 11:16 AM
Roberta if you are in the country "illegally" you don't need to commit "another" crime or "be in a gang" to be deported (most "undocumented visitors" are also commiting multiple other crimes every day like driving without a license, driving wothout insurance and other financial crimes since it is hard to be in the country "illegally" and pay the "income tax" and other taxes everyone in the US has to pay - I wonder if even a single illegal house cleaner in Davis has ever paid the gross reciepts tax to the city like I do every year).
Most Democrats looked the other way when Immigrants rights groups named Obama the "Deporter in Chief" (and he put kids in cages), but go crazy when Trump deports some gang members (and say that just because a guy has a MS13 neck tat does not "prove" he is in a gang).
https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/deporter-chief
Every year I have been alive I have watched the courts get more and more "political" and more often than not "judges" spend time on the bench making decisions to benifit "both" the RNC funders and DNC funders that got them the position (the guy that wants Trump to bring the gang members back is pasically a full time DNC operative that works part time as a judge making highly partisan decisions).
P.S. A right of center friend of mine wants Trump to bring all the gang members back to the US and fly them all to Martha's Vineyard (where so many politicians have multi-million dollar vacation homes).
P.P.S. I recently saw a Meme with a photo of a modest home that said typical home of a MD that makes $200K and photo of a giant mansion that said typical home of a politician that makes $200K (Obama has multiple homes worth over $10 million and Senator Feinstein owned over a half dozen homes worth over $100 million when she died)...
Posted by: South of Davis | April 06, 2025 at 03:00 PM
You're missing the point and/or you are misinformed. At least some of the Venezuelans who were deported to a prison in El Salvador were here legally.
Posted by: Roberta L. Millstein | April 06, 2025 at 03:58 PM
And thus, nuance . . . :-|
Posted by: Alan C. Miller | April 06, 2025 at 05:26 PM
I have not been able to find anyone stating that the people who were deported to El Salvador were here illegally. The claim is that they were gang members. However, they were not given any due process to determine if they actually were gang members. (Even then, they are invoking a law that is arguably not relevant, but which gives the president a ridiculous amount amount of power, if it were relevant). They were deported on the basis of trivial information like tattoos. They are now stuffed into cells in El Salvador, as was seen in a widely distributed photo, for an indefinite amount of time, with no plan to ever release them. The judge ordered the planes to be turned around. The Trump administration did not comply. A few people have been pretty definitively determined not to be gang members. The judge ordered them to be returned, but the Trump administration claims that they cannot do so, even though they are paying El Salvador for the imprisonment.
When you take people out of the country and don’t give them to process, it doesn’t matter what their status is, because without due process that could happen to any of us. Maybe we don’t have our documentation on us, or somebody claims that it’s fake, you were just shoved in a prison in another country with no hope of getting out, unless a court can convince the government to do something. So that’s where things stand now.
I fail to see any nuance here.
Posted by: Roberta L. Millstein | April 06, 2025 at 08:03 PM
I think that Roberta and others who live in a "blue bubble" fail to see that when Black and Hispanic voters see the Democrat party as the party that wants to bring violent gang menbers back to their communities (They are not asking that the MS 13 members be sent to "blue bubble" areas like Martha's Vineyard, Davis, Claremont or Palo Alto) they are less likely to vote Democrat (and if white libeal women keep calling them LatinX and asking for their pronouns we are a couple election cycles away from the fastest frowing voting block in the US to have the majority supporting the GOP. I work with Hispanic working class guys every day and almost none of them voted for Trump the first time and almost all of them voted for Trump this time...
Posted by: South of Davis | April 06, 2025 at 09:23 PM
You keep repeating the "gang members" talking point. But as I pointed out already, many of the people who are deported are not gang members, and the government basically admits that they have little to no evidence of gang affiliation or activity.
For example, concerning Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the government now admits, "We have nothing to say on the merits. We concede he should not have been removed to El Salvador.” When the Judge asked what the basis for holding Abrego Gracia in the CECOT was, the government's lawyer responded, “I don’t know. That information has not been given to me. I don’t know.”
And by the way, the government's lawyer has now been fired for speaking the truth. That's not acceptable for Trump's administration.
So, although many voters, including Black and Hispanic voters, might be glad to see actual gang members deported, are they happy to have people deported without evidence? And then have the US government make the ridiculous claim that they can't be returned once they're sent to prison in El Salvador?
I think people who know about this aren't happy, and they certainly won't be happy if they or their friends or family get start getting deported simply because their country of origin isn't the US, which is what is happening to the Venezuelans, regardless of their legal or gang status.
As of right now, the government has been ordered for Garcia to be returned by the end of the day. We'll see what happens as the back and forth in the courts continues.
Posted by: Roberta L. Millstein | April 07, 2025 at 09:24 AM
Update: The case I mentioned is now headed to the Supreme Court. This could really decide whether the US government can send people to prisons in other countries on thin evidence/no evidence/no due process and then say "oops, sorry, not our jurisdiction anymore, we can't get you back."
This is why I am not interested in red and blue games.
Posted by: Roberta L. Millstein | April 07, 2025 at 11:27 AM