As the summer of 2025 gets underway, many Santa Fe area residents are engaging in rallies, protests, and marches to express their views on a variety of recent federal government actions.
According to the Santa Fe New Mexican, over 3000 people attended the June 14 No King’s Day march at the Roundhouse. Approximately 2,000 people attended a public lands protest on June 24 at De Vargas Park.
Protests in Los Angeles in early June resulted in violence, looting, and other unwanted results—while recent marches and rallies in Santa Fe have remained peaceful—no angry mobs, no violence, no scuffles with police.
We wanted to understand why.
Catherine Bing is vice-chair of Indivisible Santa Fe, one of the organizers of these two recent protests.
We asked Bing to tell us what Indivisible Santa Fe hopes to accomplish when organizing rallies and protests.
"The purpose of Indivisible Santa Fe is to encourage a wider set of people to attend these events and to recruit them because we feel that it’s important for the people who are angry or upset - you know, have concern about something that is happening - they need places to go, people to talk to, and things to do. So those are the things we have been doing."
Bing tells us that “safe” events don’t just happen by chance or good luck - rather - it requires carefully focused planning to ensure the safety and security of all participants.
"Its all about how can we get people who care about these things - regardless of their political background - you know we want them to be able to come out to a place where it is safe, where it is fun. We are focused on that when we are preparing for these kinds of events.
We were given a legal overview of what all the laws & rules & regulations were. We also were offered training. We went to a thing called de-escalation training. There were a lot of things in there about “self-security.” You want to know as an individual where the exits are; what happens if somebody in the crowd start misbehaving - what do you do?"
Santa Fe and Albuquerque are major population centers in New Mexico can easily draw large numbers of participants.
We wanted to know what’s happening in less populated rural areas of NM. Bing says there’s quite a lot going on throughout the state.
"There are 30 Indivisible organizations as of yesterday in New Mexico. There are in places like Farmington, Cochiti Lake, Silver City, Gallup, Las Cruces, Abiquiu and so on and so forth. And we, in fact, just this past week are talking about renting a van and carpooling to some of these places where they are having events to support them."
As we ended our conversation with Catherine Bing she told us why her organization thinks these public events are so important and she encouraged all New Mexicans - regardless of political affiliation - to get involved and make their voices heard.
"It doesn’t matter what your politics are - please come in, let us help you feel better about what is happening. Express what your concerns are and find ways that are peaceful ways to demonstrate what you care about so that we - all over the United States - can be more obvious in terms of what we do and what we care about."
