Americans across all 50 states began marching in protests against the Trump administration on Saturday, aligning behind a message that the country is sliding into authoritarianism and there should be no kings in the US.
Millions of people have turned out for the No Kings protests, the second iteration of a coalition that marched in June in one of the largest days of protest in US history. Events were scheduled for more than 2,700 locations, from small towns to large cities, reflecting a decentralisation in an anti-Donald Trump movement that focused on demonstrations in Washington DC during his first presidency.
The rallies are a turnaround from just six months ago, when Democrats seemed at a loss as to how to counter Republicans’ grip of the White House and both houses of Congress after stinging national election losses.
“What we are seeing from the Democrats is some spine,” Ezra Levin, a co-founder of Indivisible, a key organizing group, told the Associated Press. “The worst thing the Democrats could do right now is surrender.”
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There are concerns protesters may be targeted for federal government surveillance. This could involve a range of technology including facial recognition and phone hacking. The level of surveillance at protests and the type of technology in use was likely to be both location-specific and dependent on the police forces present, said Thorin Klosowski, a security and privacy activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
For instance, crowds in Washington DC, where anti-scale fencing has been erected around the White House complex, are likely to come under different levels of surveillance to those in a small rural town.
“Under previous administrations, law enforcement surveillance of peaceful demonstrations was already commonplace and corrosive of free expression,” said Ryan Shapiro, executive director of government transparency group Property of the People.
“Given Trump’s open hostility to even minor dissent, such surveillance now poses an existential threat to what remains of American democracy and only underscores the need for mass protest.”
In Chicago, at Grant Park’s Butler Field, at least 10,000 people assembled, many with signs opposing federal immigration agents or mocking Mr Trump.
Some of them said “Hands Off Chicago”, a rallying cry that began when the president first announced his intent to send the national guard into the city. Others read “Resist Fascism”.
Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, told the crowd the Trump administration had “decided that they want a rematch of the civil war”, which the white supremacist Confederacy lost to the Union in the 19th century.
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“We are here to stand firm and stand committed that we will not bend, we will not bow, we will not cower, we will not submit,” Mr Johnson said. “We do not want troops in our city.”
More than 200,000 Washington DC-area residents rallied near the US Capitol. In many cities, protesters wore inflatable animal costumes – a theme created during immigration enforcement protests in Portland, Oregon, to counter the administration’s narrative of a city under the grip of lawlessness and chaos.
The Trump administration on Friday asked the US supreme court to permit the deployment of national guard troops to Illinois, as the president pushed to expand the domestic use of the military in a growing number of Democratic-led cities.
In an emergency filing to the supreme court, the justice department urged the court to overturn a lower-court ruling that halted the deployment of several hundred national guard troops to the Chicago area. The district judge had raised doubts about the administration’s justification for sending troops.
A federal appeals court upheld the lower court’s decision on Thursday, keeping the deployment on hold while the legal challenge proceeds.
Late on Friday evening, US district judge Sara Ellis ordered federal officers to use body cameras. Ellis said those officers trained and equipped with body-worn cameras must turn them on while conducting immigration enforcement activity, including during interactions with the public.
Mr Trump has already sent national guard units to Chicago and Portland, following earlier deployments to Los Angeles, Memphis, and Washington DC. The US president has argued that military intervention is needed to curb unrest and bolster immigration enforcement.
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The US president and his supporters have portrayed these cities as dangerous and overwhelmed by violent demonstrations, framing the military’s role as essential to restoring order.
Democratic officials have pushed back sharply, saying the president’s claims are greatly exaggerated and politically motivated. They accuse Mr Trump of misusing his authority to punish opponents.
Judges have also voiced scepticism about the administration’s depiction of events. Local leaders say protests over immigration enforcement have been mostly small and peaceful, contradicting Mr Trump’s characterisation of “war zone” conditions. – Guardian/Reuters
