SALISBURY — No hate. No fear. Immigrants are welcome here.

That chant reverberated along the 100 block of West Innes Street in Salisbury on Saturday as protesters took to the space in front of the Rowan County Administration Building.

A couple dozen people joined the line of demonstrators, propping up homemade signs. Donna Prunkl held a megaphone and would lead the group in various chants as cars made their way through downtown.

Responding cars would honk, seemingly in support.

It was the second such demonstration in the last month and was organized by Lynda Santamaria, the same person who spearheaded the first one.

The event, much like the first, branded itself as a “peaceful protest in support of all of our immigrant neighbors.”

However, while the first protest featured more than 100 attendees, this one was a bit smaller. Reflecting on that, Santamaria said it was likely the selected time.

“I think a lot of the Hispanic community works on the weekends and I did not take that into consideration,” she said. “If we do another one it will probably have to be after 5 p.m. or 6 p.m. when it starts getting darker a little bit later.”

Since Saturday’s event, Santamaria said she has been the recipient of some hateful messaging, although she admitted that was not surprising. However, the racial nature of the messages was a little different than one might expect, pointing to how many of Saturday’s protesters were white.

“Do you guys really think we care about a bunch of white people out there protesting?” one of the messages read, she said. “I think it bothered people that there are people who look like them that don’t agree with them.”

Santamaria said she worries that mixed messaging could have also impacted the turnout.

“Some people thought it was fake again,” she said. “I am not sure where the confusion is coming about, if people are spreading that its fake to discourage people from coming.”

Santamaria mentioned that not every vehicle that passed presented a positive interaction. On Saturday, some people drove by, rolled windows down and gave them the middle finger. In that regard, it was better than the first one though.

“We did have a few incidents last time,” she said. “Someone came by rolled down their window and spit on one of us.”

Although there were not as many people, Santamaria said that the event was still productive and had positive results.

“This helped me get a lot more contacts,” she said. “I have had people message me from other cities. … There is a big group of us planning to go to the protest in D.C. (later this month). This helped a lot of us come together that did not know each other before.”

In the lead up to the event, Santamaria told the Salisbury Post’s Elisabeth Strillacci that this second demonstration had the same message as the first because it was important to “to impress upon people the seriousness of this.”

For Santamaria, the event is about shifting the national spotlight on immigration.

“We want people to understand that the focus should be on immigration reform, and not on deporting people who are hard-working and contributors to society,” she said. “Unless they have committed crimes. We wholeheartedly agree with deporting those who are criminals. But people who have worked here for years, paying taxes, paying money into the system that they will never see and never get the benefit of, they deserve a chance to become American. They deserve to stay.”

Becoming legal is not as easy as many think, she added.

“It’s not a quick process. Unless you have a sponsor or fit into one of the very specific programs, you have no avenue,” Santamaria said. “People in their 20s and 30s that were brought here when they were one or two years old have no connections in other countries. No history, often no family, no association. This is all they know.”

She said it’s easy for people to forget that, but sending people to the country of their parents’ origin is not sending them “home,” but sending them somewhere unknown and often dangerous. During the last protest two weeks ago, there were no anti-protesters despite rumblings that there would be. And while she is grateful for the peace, Santamaria said that if anyone showed up on Saturday that it would be their right to do so.

Much like the first protest, aside from an occasional jeer from a passing car, no apparent opposition was present. Members of the Salisbury Police Department were parked across the street just in case.

Elisabeth Strillacci’s reporting contributed to this story.