Nedda Sarshar knew from the beginning that a Donald Trump administration would put domestic human rights at-risk.

“There needs to be a resistance and a push-back from the ground up,” Sarshar said. “I could not be content with other people planning it. I needed to be active and engaged in planning it, too.”

So she did. She pushed from the ground up.

President-elect Trump will be sworn into America’s highest office on Friday, but anti-Trump activists are making sure his transition won’t be easy. They aren’t going down without a fight.

Sarshar is one leading activist at SU, a senior writing and rhetoric, citizenship and civic engagement and policy studies triple major. She is a member of the Syracuse University and State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry Coalition for Justice — the group responsible for the Nov. 16 1,000-person walkout. The walkout called for the two schools to become sanctuary campuses.

This weekend, the group will follow up on its campus protests. Several members are making the trip to Washington, D.C. to participate in the Women’s March on Washington this Saturday. Others will march in solidarity in Syracuse and other cities.

The Women’s March on Washington boasts about 210,000 participants and 255,000 people interested on its Facebook page as of Wednesday night. And while organizers have said the march is not explicitly anti-Trump, the causes championed — women’s rights along with brown, queer and immigrant rights — run opposite of Trump’s platform.

Alexis Rinck, a political science and sociology dual major, is heading down to D.C. with fellow Coalition for Justice member Amy Quichiz. Rinck anticipates the women’s march will be as exhilarating as the walkout, which she described as both “terrifying” and “comforting.”

“I don’t really know what’s going to happen, how people are going to react, what it’s going to look like,” Rinck said of the march. “(But) I kind of expect to feel that same sort of feeling of comfort of, ‘OK, here’s people that care. Here’s people that are equally or more engaged about this as I am.’”

While Rinck is “not very happy” about the reasons for protesting, she does see the positive side. Rinck said she is looking forward to connecting and bonding with like-minded people in a way that she would not have been able to before.

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Kristi Andersen, a professor emeritus of political science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, compared anti-Trump sentiment to post-election protests of the past. The closest response she has seen was national dissatisfaction with the electoral process that made George W. Bush president in 2000.

“But they weren’t questioning the legitimacy of George W. Bush in the same way,” Andersen said. “Much of the protests are saying that Trump is simply not qualified or fit — temperamentally prepared — to be president.”

Trump has compelled people to go beyond their social circles in an unprecedented way, she added.

“There’s a necessity to do more than just talk to your friends and post on Facebook,” Andersen said. “That there are ways in which we need to stand together and say, ‘OK, we don’t accept a lot of the presumptions of your incoming administration and your behavior.’”

Katie Oran, a junior environmental communications major at SUNY-ESF, also sees inaugural protests as a touchstone for student-led activism.The nearly unheard of wave of anti-presidential dissent can help set the tone for resistance to Trump for the next four years, she said.

“The policies that he’s planning to enact will not fly by under the radar,” Oran said. “People are taking notice. People will be taking notice. And there will be a public outcry.”

But there is more to protesting than being passionate and raising your voice, Oran added — especially now, advocates must show how much they will risk for justice.

“We have to put our bodies on the line and say that we’re not only just talk when we see our community members being targeted (as) victims of hateful rhetoric and hateful violence,” Oran said.

During inauguration weekend, Farrell Brenner, a senior women’s and gender studies and citizenship and civic engagement dual major, will be attending the National LGBTQ Task Force’s Creating Change Conference in Philadelphia. She said there is still a place for good old-fashioned protests.

“Other people can control what they see online — they can easily ignore things, they can mute you, they can block you, depending on the platform,” Brenner said. “But when it’s in-person? You can’t ignore it. When people are blocking the streets, that’s inconvenient. You can’t scroll past that.”

Looking ahead to the next four or eight years, Sarshar plans to “stay woke.” For her, that means “never letting (herself) become comfortable with a rhetoric that normalizes racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and other forms of oppression.” This also involves taking Trump seriously and not waiting to see what happens.

To her, that’s not OK.

“I think (the election) was my wake-up call to realize that social justice is not trendy,” Sarshar said. “It’s not something that you put on your resume. It’s actually what I want to be dedicating my life to.”

Published on January 18, 2017 at 11:14 pm