TOP IMMIGRATION GROUPS ARE GEARING UP TO HOLD a major immigration march called Mega Marcha 2025, which would mark the most significant opposition to the Trump administration’s increasingly aggressive deportation regime so far this year.

But they’re running into a problem. If they gather in serious numbers, there’s a distinct chance that ICE could show up.

Organizers of the gathering are eager to tap into the spirit and energy of years past, when community members and advocates came out to rally popular support for immigration reform. The groups leading the planning include the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), one of the oldest and largest Hispanic organizations in the country. And the expectation is that between 20,000 and 50,000 attendees could show up on Sunday in Dallas, Texas, along with celebrities like John Leguizamo and George Lopez who are coming out to support the cause.

Officials told The Bulwark they want military veterans to wear uniforms, nurses to don scrubs, graduates to wear cap and gowns, and attendees to wave American flags.

“We want to show the real face of America’s immigrants and not the false narrative that all immigrants are criminal gang members and cartel members,” Domingo García, the chair of LULAC’s political arm, said.

“We march because hate and fear-mongering have no place in the White House, the State House, and our American homes,” the website for the march says.

This strategy isn’t new. In 2018, during Donald Trump’s first term, tens of thousands of people showed up in cities across America to protest the administration’s actions and support broader reform. In 2006, immigration advocates organized ‘La Gran Marcha’ in Los Angeles, which saw half a million people mobilize to advocate comprehensive immigration legislation.

But 2025 presents challenges that didn’t exist in 2018 or 2006—mainly, a climate of suffusive fear, deliberately cultivated by the federal government, whose law enforcement agencies want potential protestors to know that they might swoop in and detain them.

“They’re not going to stand down and let the opportunity pass. This is what ICE does—the third letter literally stands for enforcement,” said Ed Espinoza, a longtime Texas leader who ran Progress Texas for a decade. “Our people need to be a little less naïve to these realities.”

The fears Espinoza describes are just the latest example of the harrowing calculations that immigrants’ rights advocates now feel they must carefully consider before acting. The Trump administration has ramped up its mass deportations at the behest of a numbers-obsessed president, with top Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials already replaced for underperformance, and official quotas put in place for ICE field offices. In the process, the federal government has become fixated on using every lever in reach to increase the pressure on undocumented immigrants. Those communities now live in fear of a knock on their door, a workplace raid, or even being disappeared to a notorious Salvadoran prison.

García said he has a plan to ensure the safety of attendees. He has been working with the Dallas police department on permits, and organizers met with local officials to ensure they’re part of the planning process. They’re also in contact with local FBI to identify threats and counter-protesters, and are putting in place contingency plans in case any outside agitator tries to turn the peaceful demonstration into something more violent.

I asked García if he was concerned that ICE could take the opportunity to disrupt the march and seize immigrants.

“They never have before,” García stressed. “It would be politically stupid if they came after marchers.”

THE FIRST AMENDMENT, WHICH GUARANTEES free speech, allows groups to peacefully assemble or protest in public areas. While protests have often bedeviled recent Democratic and Republican presidents like George W. Bush and Barack Obama, it wasn’t until the Trump administration that activists were openly and even ostentatiously targeted by law enforcement agencies in response to directives from the president, who has a habit of calling for protests to be put down with both the badge and the baton.

Democrats and activists said they disagree with García about whether it’s likely ICE will show up with handcuffs for protestors. They note that the administration has already gone to college campuses specifically to target students who have participated in protests that they’ve deemed to be damaging to U.S. national security interests. Opponents say this is the state stamping out dissent.

Espinoza said believing that ICE would decide against showing up on account of it being too politically problematic reflects a naïve hope progressives have held on to in recent years: that certain norms can be upheld and even revived. That paradigm, he added, no longer exists.

“This whole idea that it would be ‘politically stupid’—this administration has people working for them who do whatever the hell they want. The forces we’re operating against don’t act on rationale or strategy. It’s just blunt force,” he said.

For his part, García acknowledged that demonstrators at events like this must assume some responsibility for how the event could unfold. He said his conversations with law enforcement have centered on even darker eventualities, like the possibility that someone could try to drive a car through attendees.

He grew serious when discussing the high stakes of holding an immigration event in Texas. In 2019, a north Texas man drove 10 hours to a Walmart near the border with Mexico to murder Mexicans, Latinos, and immigrants because he feared an “invasion”—the same language Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Trump have used to describe illegal immigration and frame their policies to end it.

“We have to be ready. All it takes is one crazy,” García said. “Look at what happened in El Paso at the Walmart.”

But he also said if police were to step in to arrest anyone attending the march, organizers would be ready for that, too.

“When you’re fighting for justice and creating good trouble and fac[ing] any official type of repression, people are ready to go to jail,” he told me. “Civil disobedience, freedom—these are American values etched in the Statue of Liberty.”

CRISTINA TZINTZUN RAMIREZ, THE PRESIDENT OF NextGen America, one of the largest youth voting organizations in the country, and a veteran organizer, acknowledged the likelihood that the administration would take advantage of upcoming protests. She also said that any assurances from local ICE officials about whether they will show up or not are not reliable.

“This is a lawless administration with no respect for due process,” she said. “First Amendment rights of peaceful assembly will not protect someone.”

Still, she argued that our unprecedented times call for fighting back through mass demonstration.

“There’s always been threats and fear in the undocumented community about speaking out,” said Ramirez. “In my experience, you let people know the potential consequences, and then they make up their minds.”

Dallas ICE directed requests for comment to national ICE spokespeople, who did not respond.

Planning for the march, which is slated to begin at Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe and end at Dallas City Hall, is continuing at full speed, with LULAC, Gen-Z for Change, and local organizers promoting it on Instagram and TikTok. Still, officials note that the current political climate could dampen attendance.

“On this issue, we’re facing a headwind, and there’s people scared to show their face,” a senior Texas lawmaker told The Bulwark. “There are a bunch of people that want to forget the immigration issue altogether.”

Organizers are betting that isn’t the case. And to encourage people to join them, they have recruited a highly sympathetic figure whose story symbolizes what many view as the unforgivable cost of Trump’s mass deportation cruelty—Marbella Carranza, the mother of 11-year-old Jocelynn Rojo Carranza, who committed suicide in February after reportedly being bullied and taunted over her family’s immigration status.

“I’m here to invite you to the Mega Marcha the 30th of March in Dallas at 1 p.m. at the cathedral church,” she says in Spanish in a video organizers shared with The Bulwark. “We’re inviting you to raise our voice to ask for justice for my daughter, we want immigration reform. Don’t be afraid to march with us, I’ll be there in the front with a photo of my daughter, we’ll be supported by the police, they will be there taking care of us, ICE won’t be there. We invite you to join us.”

Should the march go forward at the scale expected, the likelihood of mass arrests would come down to whether Dallas police decide to work with ICE and hand over people they detain to the agency—if they detain people at all.

Last month, Dallas interim Police Chief Michael T. Igo held a meeting with residents in an attempt to build trust between police and the Latino community. He said at the meeting that the Dallas police department “has not been asked by either state or federal law enforcement to participate in any immigration enforcement efforts.”

Reading from an October 2017 general order, he said officers will not stop or contact any person for the sole purpose of determining immigration status “and are permitted, but not required, to ask about the immigration status only of those persons who are lawfully detained or arrested.”

Gilberto Hinojosa, the former longtime chair of the Texas Democratic Party (he resigned after the November election), told The Bulwark another complication could arise in the form of Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson. A longtime Democrat, Johnson was lavished with media attention after writing a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2023 announcing that he was switching his partisan affiliation to the Republican party because “America’s cities need Republicans.”

Hinojosa said he feared that Johnson—whom he dubbed a “turncoat mayor” who was “scrambling to brownnose the Trump administration”—would use the opportunity to encourage the Dallas PD to collaborate with ICE.

“It’s a dangerous proposition on one hand,” Hinojosa added, “but we can’t be intimidated by these people. It’s the United States, not the United States of Trump.”

A New Republic piece titled “No One Is Safe From America’s Abusive Immigration Authorities Anymore” lays out how even tourists and legal residents like recent detainee Fabian Schmidt are being terrorized by Trump-emboldened officers at ICE and CBP.

Schmidt was “violently interrogated” for hours, stripped naked, and forced into a cold shower. Given little food or water, suffering from sleep deprivation, and prevented from taking anxiety and depression medication, he collapsed and was hospitalized, his mother said.

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