- Caspar Turner | Staff
- Feb 17, 2025 (DailyCal.org)
Berkeley High School, or BHS, student groups organized a protest against encampment sweeps Feb. 14. The protest included student activists as well as members of local nonprofit Where Do We Go Berkeley.
The protest began outside the Downtown Berkeley BART Station and ultimately reached People’s Park.
Student activist and BHS sophomore Judah Press said that the protest was fighting “against the injustice of our unhoused members being sweeped throughout Berkeley and being forced to move.”
Both Press and Where Do We Go Berkeley co-founder Andrea Hensoncited the recent action taken by the city government against certain encampments as the primary impetus for the protest. These include encampments at Civic Center Park as well as Eighth and Harrison, where a judge recently granted the Berkeley Homeless Union a temporary restraining order against the city to prevent a sweep.
The protest, particularly during speeches given by community members, was temporarily disrupted by loud music an individual was playing from a speaker.
Speakers included former Berkeley City Councilmember Cheryl Davila, current District 7 Councilmember Cecilia Lunaparra and BHS alumnus John Haracz, who delivered an account of fleeing National Guardsmen during a People’s Park protest when he was a student in the late 1960s.
Between speeches, BHS student organizers Emma Knisbacher and Julio Gonzalez led chants along with UC Berkeley student Una Santiago-Caycedo.
Following the speeches and a jazz performance by a quartet of BHS students, the protesters began to march south on Shattuck Avenue. Carrying signs and chanting, the protesters turned left at Dwight Way and eventually made it to People’s Park, where several protesters rapped on the shipping containers with their fists.
“From People’s Park to Mexico, these border walls have got to go,” went one chant, shouted by an organizer through a megaphone and then repeated by the other activists in call-and-response style.
Activists at the protest stressed that they viewed the issue of houselessness in Berkeley as intersectional with other global issues: Many attendees carried or wore the Palestinian flag.
“If you look at what’s happening to the Palestinians, they’re in tents now,” Henson said. “Where do they go? Trump wants to move them. It’s exactly what’s happening in Berkeley, what’s happening in Fremont. They don’t want to see certain people.”
Update 2/18/2025: A previous version of this article misspelled John Haracz’s last name.
