Reportage
Americans protest in Rome: ‘We’re all immigrants’
“My Italian grandmother warned me about this,” reads one sign. Another says: “My father was Antifa in 1944 and helped liberate Europe.”
The protest gathering is immediately recognizable by the presence of one of the inflatable costumes that have become symbols of American dissent in cities occupied by ICE and the National Guard. Here in Rome, in Piazza dei Santi Apostoli, it’s not a frog or a banana like those seen in Portland or Chicago, but a pink axolotl.
About a hundred people took part in the “No Kings” protest in Rome last Saturday. It was one of many gatherings across Europe where Americans living or traveling abroad expressed solidarity with the massive demonstrations set to begin hours later back in the United States. Some participants are, in fact, refugees from Donald Trump's America.
“I moved here with my husband a few months ago,” says a young woman, taking her turn with the megaphone passed hand-to-hand for sharing stories and chants. “We are scientists, and the cuts to science meant we could no longer do our work.” She is a nutritionist who monitors child malnutrition. “Without the data, Trump will be able to say there are no children facing food insecurity in the U.S.”
Others are tourists, like Christina, who was visiting from Boston, where she runs a dance school, and came when she heard that there was a No Kings protest here as well. Others stop and join in when they stumble upon their demonstrating compatriots. Many others have lived in Italy for decades. This small group seems to represent all of America, with an exchange of personal testimonies that lasts for hours.
There is loud applause for those from Chicago, currently under siege by ICE, but others speaking are from Tennessee, Maryland, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Las Vegas and Ohio. One man takes the megaphone: “I lost friends, I lost family members because of Trump’s hatred” which has sown division across the country, he says, but he becomes emotional and doesn’t want to continue.
And inevitably, New York is represented as well. Tom, an Italian-American from Long Island, talks about his family arriving in the U.S. at the end of the 19th century. “They called us wops; they didn’t see us as like them.” Indeed, the most widespread sentiment is horror at the “great deportation,” the ICE raids, and the betrayal of the idea of America as a land of immigrants. One organizer asks the crowd, “How many of you have ‘foreign’ origins?” The answer is simple: everyone raises their hand.
After Trump, the figure most targeted by invectives is his ideologue Stephen Miller, followed by Marco Rubio, “who shakes hands with dictators like Putin and approves extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean Sea.” Just as the risk of a dictatorship is being highlighted, a MAGA-supporting American tourist walks by, stops to boo loudly, and shouts “Trump 2028!” – apparently missing the irony of confirming precisely the point being discussed (a third term for Trump would violate the Constitution).
One woman highlights the plight of many American women following the Supreme Court ruling that overturned the federal right to abortion. “My 23-year-old daughter has fewer rights than I enjoyed,” she says. “If it were true, as they claim, that all this is being done to protect children, they wouldn’t be slamming them to the ground to handcuff them in Chicago [referencing footage from an ICE raid], they wouldn’t be arresting them, they wouldn’t be deporting a four-year-old girl with cancer.”
At regular intervals, reminders go out for everyone to request their absentee ballots and to urge friends and relatives back home to do the same. Flyers with QR codes linking to voter registration sites for Americans abroad are distributed. All eyes are on the November elections in places like New York and Virginia, but especially on next year’s midterms, seen as crucial to averting what everyone quietly fears has already happened.
“My Italian grandmother warned me about this,” reads one sign. Another says: “My father was Antifa in 1944 and helped liberate Europe.” When it’s time for music, Christina from Boston (whose family has Italian and Armenian roots) leads the crowd in singing Bella Ciao: everyone joins in, at least for the chorus.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/degli-americani-a-roma-al-canto-di-bella-ciao-siamo-tutti-immigrati on 2025-10-19