Candace Bergstrom has a plan in mind if U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ever comes knocking on her classroom door.

“I asked myself, what would I do if somebody came in there? I would stand in front of a student,” the NHTI faculty member said. “I might get roughed up or arrested, but I don’t care.”

Bergstrom stood with several hundred other protesters in front of the State House arch in Concord, explaining that she’s a teacher and, pointing to her posterboard sign, “we love our immigrant students.”

Another woman, Frumie Selchen, was born in Canada and is now a U.S. citizen. She’s seen the national rhetoric filter down to the state level, and she said that the nation has become too concerned with immigration. She’d rather focus on other things, like funding the arts.

So, Selchen drove an hour and a half from the North Country town of Wonalancet to put her anger to good use.

“Just being angry isn’t useful,” she said.

People from across the state acted on that sentiment as they gathered Thursday evening for May Day, a moment on the calendar that celebrates workers’ and immigrants’ rights. Granite Staters who rallied – some of them immigrants – took the opportunity to express their dismay over the Trump administration’s immigration policies and actions, as well as drawing attention to immigrants’ contributions to America.

“They work and contribute to our society,” Bergstrom said. “They make it rich, with bringing their cultures and experiences to us. We can’t have a white-bred society. That’s not America.”

Several people took issue with an apparent lack of due process in the Trump administration’s arrests and deportations, specifically the mistaken deportation of a Maryland man, Ábrego García, to an El Salvadoran prison. Those who support the president’s policies say it’s a necessary effort to remove people who may be in the country illegally.

Bergstrom wonders whether the fear of heightened immigration enforcement has affected her class participation, saying she thinks her students “feel unsafe.”

A Stoddard resident and professor at the New Hampshire Technical Institute, she also teaches English to migrants through the International Institute of New England and the New Hampshire Humanities Council’s Connections program. She’s noticed fewer people attending in person recently than when she started in December.

As she spoke, she often paused to wave her sign as passing cars honked in support on their way down Main Street. Behind her, a throng of boisterous protesters held their flags and signs and sang to the Woody Guthrie anthem, “This Land Is Your Land,” and other songs. It was at least the eighth anti-Trump protest in Concord since he took office in January.

Another participant, Neil Kenny, said he came to the U.S. from Ireland about 45 years ago and obtained citizenship about 25 years ago. He doesn’t necessarily worry about being deported himself, but he imagines it could happen – especially with his thick Irish accent as a giveaway.

“The way it is now is, if a cop’s after me, he can arrest me because I am an American citizen, but I don’t carry my passport with me and I have no way of proving that I’m an American citizen,” Kenny said. “It’s getting more like Germany in the forties, you know?”

He and his wife, Ellen Kenny, live in Concord. They joined the crowd on Thursday because, as Neil put it, “people’s rights are being trod on left, right and center.”

“They’re kicking a lot of good people out of the country – I’m sure bad ones as well – but a lot of good people,” Neil said. “America’s built on immigrants. That’s the whole thing, you know?”

Charlotte Matherly is the statehouse reporter for the Concord Monitor and Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in partnership with Report for America. Follow her on X at @charmatherly, subscribe to her Capital Beat newsletter and send her an email at cmatherly@cmonitor.com.