CLEVE­LAND — The morn­ing after Don­ald J. Trump offi­cial­ly became the Repub­li­can can­di­date for Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States on a plat­form promis­ing a wall along the U.S.-Mexico bor­der, activists in Cleve­land, Ohio built a wall of their own.

'I think this is a great action. Maybe the best action I’ve seen. It’s visual and impactful. Things went just the way they should be going.'

About 150 pro­tes­tors arrived in Pub­lic Square and dis­trib­uted can­vas tarps paint­ed with bricks and fenc­ing, with the words ​“Wall Off Trump.” The can­vas, which stretched 2,000 feet, was cut into both long chunks and indi­vid­ual pon­chos that par­tic­i­pants draped over themselves.

From the square they marched, chant­i­ng and singing, to the con­ven­tion, sur­round­ed by a swarm of media that threat­ened to out­num­ber the activists them­selves. Upon arriv­ing near the bar­ri­cad­ed entrance to the con­ven­tion, they stretched out into a sin­gle file line and held hands or linked arms and formed a paint­ed human wall that stretched down the block.

The action was pri­mar­i­ly orga­nized by Ruckus Soci­ety, a non­prof­it direct action orga­niz­er, and Mijente, a Lat­inx activism orga­ni­za­tion. (Lat­inx is a gen­der-neu­tral term for peo­ple of Latin Amer­i­can descent used by Mijente and oth­ers.) Rep­re­sen­ta­tives from oth­er groups like Iraq Vet­er­ans Against the War, Grass­roots Glob­al Jus­tice, Unit­ed We Dream Youth Action, and oth­er social jus­tice orga­ni­za­tions helped form the wall. About fifty oth­er activists already in Cleve­land heard about the march and joined in solidarity.

“This was beau­ti­ful. This was wild­ly suc­cess­ful,” LJ Ams­ter­dam, a con­trac­tor with Ruckus who helped keep the wall togeth­er and coor­di­nate the march, said. ​“We had front­line peo­ple step up and be super brave, we got every­one back safe­ly, we deployed beau­ti­ful art, and we got fuck­tons of press.”

Ohioan activists like Orga­nize! Ohio exec­u­tive direc­tor Lar­ry Bresler were impressed with the action. He formed part of the wall and amidst chants of ​“Wall off Trump!” and ​“Trump equals hate, there is no debate!” he told In These Times, ​“I think this is a great action. Maybe the best action I’ve seen. It’s visu­al and impact­ful. Things went just the way they should be going.”

There were very few pro-Trump activists present and the marchers faced no resis­tance from police or counter-protestors.

Orga­niz­ers raised over $15,000 on Indiegogo to fund the project and they cre­at­ed the wall over the course of sev­en days and nights in the Cleve­land Mason­ic Tem­ple. ​“Most of the mon­ey went towards buy­ing the mate­ri­als, the can­vas and paint, which is pret­ty expen­sive,” Tania Unzue­ta, Mijente’s pol­i­cy direc­tor and the lead orga­niz­er for the action, said.

The rest of the mon­ey went to help­ing about 20 of the activists arrange trav­el and hous­ing. Every­one else came on their own dime. Only a small core of peo­ple paint­ed most of the 2000 feet of can­vas. ​“We only had four peo­ple for the first half of the week, but we grad­u­al­ly grew to about twen­ty-five peo­ple,” Unzue­ta said.

Sea­mus, 25, and Tisha, 35, trav­eled from Iowa to protest the RNC and helped paint the wall for a few hours. ​“There was no air con­di­tion­ing where they were paint­ing and a lot of those guys were work­ing all day. They were putting in seri­ous work,” Sea­mus said.

The par­tic­i­pants came from a vari­ety of orga­ni­za­tions, some advo­cat­ing spe­cif­ic immi­gra­tion poli­cies rang­ing from the mori­bund DREAM Act to a rein­state­ment of Pres­i­dent Obama’s 2014 exec­u­tive action. The exec­u­tive action, recent­ly blocked by the Supreme Court, sought to at least tem­porar­i­ly shield from depor­ta­tion all undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants who have lived in the Unit­ed States since at least 2010, have no crim­i­nal record and have chil­dren who are U.S. cit­i­zens or law­ful per­ma­nent res­i­dents. Oth­ers present empha­sized dif­fer­ent caus­es like envi­ron­men­tal­ism, repro­duc­tive rights, and Black Lives Matter.

It was a diverse group, old and (most­ly) young, Lat­inx, black, white and LGBT, a small rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the nation­wide coali­tion deter­mined to deny Trump the White House.

But every­one was, for this march, unit­ed in their rebuke of the Repub­li­can nominee’s hate­ful rhetoric towards immi­grants and Latinxs.

“The wall was sym­bol­ic of our com­mu­ni­ties, includ­ing doc­u­ment­ed and undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants, com­ing togeth­er to pro­tect our­selves from the hatred, the xeno­pho­bia that Trump rep­re­sents,” Unzue­ta said.