DOWNTOWN – “Chicago is Trump’s favorite dog whistle,” veteran organizer Kobi Guillory said as his eyes scanned over a mass of protesters that overwhelmed Downtown streets Saturday.

Guillory is a Chicago Teacher’s Union member and co-chair of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression . He’s been active in the Chicago activist community for years – and yet Saturday’s major protest blasting President Donald Trump and Elon Musk was one of the strongest showings he’s ever seen from the city, Guillory said.

Around 30,000 people flooded Daley Plaza, 50 W. Washington St., around noon Saturday for the national “Hands Off” day of action, a spokesperson for the rally said. The series of nationwide protests — taking place across over 1,200 communities including in most major cities and local suburbs — sought to denounce Trump and Musk’s defunding of federal agencies and presidential orders targeting rights for marginalized groups.

A diverse group of organizers joined Saturday’s protest, including the Chicago Federation of Labor, Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, Indivisible Chicago, Sierra Club Illinois, and many others.

“One of my teacher’s union siblings said to me recently that nothing organizes people like a bad boss,” Guillory explained in an interview. “Trump is exactly the kind of threat that unites people who have a clear vision about what needs to happen and what these attacks are. All of us have to be united to fight against the attack, because in just the past three months we’ve had executive order after executive order that has attacked basically every American.”

The event began at Daley Plaza with a slate of speakers who shared remarks before an audience that overtook the plaza and spilled out into the surrounding streets. The sound of the speakers’ voices couldn’t travel out to the crowd’s periphery before getting drowned out by the roar of the protesters.

Sarah Garza Resnick, CEO of pro-choice group Personal PAC, spoke at Saturday’s protest and underscored the importance of electoral accountability, especially after last week’s Supreme Court election results in Wisconsin , where the Musk-backed Brad Schimmel was defeated handily by Susan Crawford.

“Hold your elected officials accountable,” Garza Resnick said, “If they do something that you like, tell them! If they do something that you don’t like, also tell them! This country’s election results [in] Wisconsin give me hope that people are waking up and realizing that every single level of government matters.”

Jack Darin, representing the Illinois Chapter of the climate advocacy group Sierra Club, spoke about the threats the Trump administration poses to renewable energy and environmental protections.

Most recently, the Trump administration has quietly been carrying out a nationwide plan to end toxic “forever chemical” bans, according to the Guardian. The plan is one of many reforms the administration has enacted against regulatory bodies like the EPA, protest organizers said.

“No one voted to go backwards on climate change and stop building clean energy,” Darin said. “No one voted to sell off our National parks and forests to pay for tax cuts for the rich. So we say hands off our public lands. And no one voted to go backwards on the progress we’re making on environmental justice to protect our Black and brown communities that are breathing dirtier air and water. So we say, hands off the EPA folks.”

Chants of “hands off our federal workers,” swelled through the crowd.

April Verrett, president of the Service Employee’s International Union [SEIU], condemned attacks on workers and students, and mentioned the recent detention of pro-Palestinian student activist and fellow SEIU member Rumeysa Ozturk .

“Hands off our people,” Verrett said. “Hands off the workers in this country who are just trying to do the very best that they can for their families. Hands off Rumeysa Ozturk, who was snatched off the streets of Boston. She is an SEIU member, and she did nothing wrong. So we are saying hands off! Our First Amendment speech shouldn’t cost us anything.”

Other topics that organizers covered included abortion rights, LGBTQIA+ advocacy , recent tariffs , cuts to healthcare and more.

Around 1 p.m., protesters slowly mobilized in the streets. The march began moving west down Washington Street before turning south on LaSalle Street and snaking through the Loop. The rally remained peaceful throughout, attended by protesters of all ages.

Police cordoned off much of the Loop to make way for the protest for about two hours in the early Saturday afternoon.

Jill Hoff, a nurse with over 45 years of experience in healthcare attending Saturday’s march, said that Trump policies are “already killing people.”

Although the administration has made promises to protect Medicaid, proposed budget cuts will most likely gut the program that provides one in five Americans with healthcare, according to the Vera Institute .

“So many of our patients and families rely on Medicaid,” she said. “In fact, I would say pretty much every older person who lives in a facility will eventually rely on Medicaid. So the cuts to Medicaid [will just be] devastating to people’s health, and people are dying because of the decisions that [the Trump administration] is making.”

Brian Patrick, a public school history teacher in attendance wearing a bear costume to promote U.S. National Park Service protections, is worried about what the dissolution of the Department of Education could mean for his students.

“Our school is one of the schools that receives funding from the Department of Education, so we will see that affect next year’s budget,” Patrick said. “My students will be affected by that. Because we studied the Constitution, my students know that he’s violating all of the principles of democracy. He’s violating and ignoring the Constitution. My students are smart enough, probably smarter than he is, to understand that this is not something that should be allowed in a democracy, and that’s why we all need to speak up.”