As many as 10,000 protesters jammed the streets of the Mission District Monday night in yet more public opposition to ICE actions in California, but a small splinter group hit Civic Center late at night, leading to arrests and SFPD pepper sprayings.  

San Francisco continues to raise hell over ICE actions here and ICE raids in Southern California, and President Trump’s unauthorized calling of the National Guard and now the Marines in response to protests there. (And as the Chronicle reported Monday, this is a woefully underfunded effort with guardsmen forced to sleep on cement floors in basements.) Sunday’s SF protests netted as many as 154 arrests according to media reports, setting the table for another round of protests Monday night.

Organizers told SFist that there were “more than 10,000” protesters Monday night in the Mission District, and we can say with certainty that there was definitely well north of 5,000 people out there. (The above video is just a small sliver of the crowd.) And it was largely very peaceful, albeit with a smattering of graffiti applied to McDonald’s and Wells Fargo storefronts.

But, then, as seen above, a splinter group of an estimated 80 of those protesters went window-smashing and looking for trouble near Civic Center. Mission Local reports that police pepper-sprayed that smaller group of protesters and arrested “dozens” in the after-protest, while the Chronicle says that SFPD used “less-lethal projectiles” at the Civic Center component.

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According to the Examiner, Monday's demonstrations started with some speeches on the steps of City Hall at around 4 pm.

"If you're thinking of targeting a single one of my residents in District 5 … you're going to have to come through me first,” declared Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, who according to the Examiner, then shouted his own home address out loud. “If you have a bone to pick with our people, I'm right here.”

The protest then moved to Mission Street and the Mission District, swelling to the crowd of perhaps 10,000 marchers.

Among their many chants, a few stood out as the best:

• “No fear, no hate, no ICE in our state”
• “No justice, no peace. No ICE or police”
• “Up, up with immigration. Down, down with deprtation”
• (To the tune of Ludacris’s “Move Bitch”) “Move ICE, get out the way, get out the way, get out the way”

“Were going to defend immigrant rights. We’re not going to let the Trump administration or ICE or the National Guard initmidate us,” Sabina Wildman, of the protest’s co-organizer Party for Socialism and Libration, told SFist. “Ultimately, an attack againt immigrants is an attack on all workers, and we need to stay out in the streets and keep fighting for our rights.”

One demonstrator shouted into a megaphone from the back of a pick-up truck, “We say we are a sanctuary [city]. But we are not. When immigrants get shot here on the street by cops, immigrants like Alex Nieto, immigrants like Luis Gongora-Pat.”

The daylight component of the protest (6-9 pm in the Mission) appeared pretty well-liaisoned with the police, with SFPD keeping streets clear of cars for the protesters to march, and seemingly communicating with a team of protest ambassadors on which street the protest would turn onto next.

And no Waymos were torched as we saw in LA, after Waymo yanked its cars from service in the Mission District Monday night.

Though it had to be an uneasy dinner for people dining in fancy Valencia Street restaurant parklets, and as we noted yesterday, Delfina decided to close for the night to avoid any such trouble. But there were no reported incidents of diners beng harassed.

There was, however, the occasional graffiti coating of certain visible targets, and one “meter maid” patrol officer may have picked the wrong night to park their vehicle on the street.

One instance of Mission District graffiti on a Muni shelter ad would have made the Billboard Libertion Front proud.

Three Mission District storefronts took the brunt of the tagging, all other storefronts were spared. (And what has McDonald’s done to be called “Zionist?”) The Wells Fargo at Mission and 22nd streets took a large number of “ACAB” taggings, and the Vanguard Properties building at Mission and 21st was spray-painted with plenty of complaints that they were a corporate landlord.

But the McDonald’s certainly took the worst of it, with protest oganizers trying to protect any innocent bystander storefronts. This led to the very amusing scene of a guy with a Viking helmet and a hockey stick adorned with a Mexican flag doing his best to protect the McDonald’s from getting tagged. It may look like he was unsuccessful, but he prevented a heck of a lot more graffiti attempts than he allowed.

The Mission District protest ended peacefully and totally dispersed by 9:30 pm. Though then an estimated 80 protesters headed down to Civic Center, determined to start some shit that that did not manifest in the peaceful Mission protest.  

By 10 pm, police declared an unlawful assembly to be in effect at Market Street and Van Ness Avenue. As we see in the second half of the video above, police outnumber the tiny handful of protesters by a seemingly exponential margin, and on-the-ground reports say they deployed pepper spray.

The Chonicle says that some windows were smashed at the Valencia Street cafe Manny’s as the after-protesters made their way to Civic Center. SFPD said in a late-night statement that “Thousands of people participated in today’s demonsstrations, which were overwhelmingly peaceful. At the very end of the night, two small grups broke off and committed vandalism and other criminal acts. SFPD developed and coordinated a plan to detain multiple individuals who refused to comply and made arrests.”

We’ve now had two consecutive days of major SF protests. And it sure seems like these won’t be the last, and we’ll be doing this all again as the week goes on.

We’re including a slew of the better protest signs we saw Monday night below. But fair warning, many of these signs contain profanities!

Related: Gov. Gavin Newsom Says California Will Sue Trump Over Unauthorized National Guard Deployment In LA [SFist]

Images: Joe Kukura, SFist