Key events
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Federal officers use gas against protesters outside Ice facility
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Closing summary
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San Francisco marchers surpass June crowds
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Crowds at Atlanta, Georgia, march rival those of previous No Kings march in June
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Protest in Chicago 2 miles long
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The day so far
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Rally in Portland turns into a massive march
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Crowds are amassing outside city hall in Los Angeles
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New York police say no arrests amid more than 100,000 peaceful protesters
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In New York, Chuck Schumer joins No Kings protesters
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In Chicago, mayor Brandon Johnson says: ‘We will not bend, we will not bow, we will not cower, we will not submit’
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In Washington DC, Bernie Sanders says: ‘This moment is not just about one man’s greed, corruption or contempt for the constitution’
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In Connecticut, Chris Murphy calls Donald Trump the ‘most corrupt president in the history of America’
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Thousands march in Washington DC, where Bernie Sanders will headline
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In Georgia, Raphael Warnock lambastes Trump’s comments to military leaders
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At least 10,000 people at field of Atlanta Civic Center to march to capital
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Bernie Sanders to headline Washington DC No Kings rally
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Trump tells Fox News: ‘I’m not a king’
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No Kings solidarity protests pop up across Europe
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Some Republican states activate National Guard ahead of No Kings protests
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What to know about the anti-Trump No Kings protests
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Opening summary
Federal officers use gas against protesters outside Ice facility
Robert Mackey
While the main protest march in downtown Portland, Oregon, was peaceful and local police officers helped block off streets and bridges for the marchers, a smaller protest outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in the city’s south waterfront neighborhood has already been met with force by federal officers.
Suzette Smith of the Portland Mercury reports on Bluesky that federal agents hurled gas canisters at protesters who gathered at the facility before a schedule 5pm protest.
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At the main rally, earlier in the afternoon, one of the organizers, Malcom Gregory Scott, a veteran and long-time activist, reminded the crowd that “Indivisible and 50501 did not organize today’s sunset protest at Ice. Our safety precautions and volunteers will not be in place, and no one should protest at ICE unless they accept the risks of possible detention, arrest, and injury.”
Given that, he added: “So those who cannot support those who can, and the young nonviolent protesters who take those risks every day— they are the iconic heroes of our times! They’re the vanguard, the sharp-witted tip of our absurdist proverbial spear! Let’s hear it for these fearless patriots! We need their courage now more than ever!”
Closing summary
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More than 2,700 demonstrations are taking place throughout the US in protest of the Trump administration, dubbed the No Kings protest. The previous iteration that marched in June was one of the largest single days of protest in US history, and today looks to closely match that record.
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Indeed, San Francisco’s downtown No Kings march surpassed the number of participants at its June march as people again gathered at Ocean Beach to recreate the “No Kings” sign with their bodies.
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Portland delivered a carnival atmosphere in the face of Donald Trump’s prediction of riots. An estimated 40,000 people marched through the city resplendent in inflatable animal costumes.
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The march and rally in Atlanta, Georgia, drew an estimated 10,000 people including the senator Raphael Warnock and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
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Chicago’s protest stretched on for 2 miles and wound past Trump Tower, where several marchers flipped off the building. The Chicago Tribune reported an estimated 100,000 people attended.
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Republican governors in several US states placed national guard troops on standby in preparation for the nationwide protests. Governors in Texas and Virginia activated their state’s national guard troops.
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Before the protests expected across all 50 states on Saturday, several protests in solidarity popped up across Europe.
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Donald Trump told Fox News, “I’m not a king,” as millions across the US were about to march against his second presidency, uniting behind a message that the nation should halt its slide toward authoritarianism.
This will conclude our coverage of the No Kings marches and rallies taking place across the nation today. Read here for more coverage.
Robert Mackey
One of the handful of Trump supporters at the protest march in Portland, Oregon, on Saturday was a local conservative influencer and activist, David Medina.
Medina, who took part in the Capitol riot on 6 January 2021, and faced a felony charge before Trump’s mass clemency, was recently included in the entourage of influencers invited to accompany the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, on her tour of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in south Portland.
After sparring with some of the protesters on camera, Medina stood by a garbage can in a riverfront park scanning his phone, near three other Trump supporters with a Charlie Kirk flag, as the estimated crowd of 40,000 demonstrators marched across the Hawthorne Bridge away from them.
San Francisco marchers surpass June crowds
Diana Ramirez-Simon
In San Francisco, hundreds of people gathered at Ocean Beach to spell out “No Kings” and “Yes on 50” with their bodies. Hayley Wingard, who was dressed as the Statue of Liberty, said she had never been to a protest before. Only recently she began to view Trump as a “dictator”.
“I was actually OK with everything until I found that the military invasion in Los Angeles and Chicago and Portland – Portland bothered me the most, because I’m from Portland, and I don’t want the military in my cities. That’s scary,” Wingard said.
Marchers in downtown San Francisco were estimated to number around 500,000, surpassing the estimate for participants in a similar march in June, said Michelle Gutierrez Vo, the president of the California Nurses Association, an organizer of the event.
House speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi marched along Market Street with the crowd, wearing a broken crown.
At a rally after the march, Joan Baez reveled in the large turnout. “You look beautiful,” she said. “There are many hundreds of thousands of you around the world. It may not be possible to turn the tide right now, but we can sure save some fishes.”
Robert Mackey
If Donald Trump ordered a riot, Portland delivered a carnival on Saturday, as an estimated 40,000 protesters marched through its downtown, hundreds of them in the inflatable animal costumes that have quickly become the hall mark of the city’s response to the president’s false claim that the Pacific Northwest city is in a state of insurrection.
The marchers largely ignored what looked like a determined effort by a handful of counter-protesters in Maga hats to provoke conflict. “Ignore them,” a protester with dyed purple hair said. “Because there’s a sea of us that are like-minded and they’re just a little drop of shit.”
“I could go over there and I could scream at them, but it won’t matter,” the protester, a young woman from neighboring Gresham, Oregon added. “This is what matters, people coming together.”
Crowds at Atlanta, Georgia, march rival those of previous No Kings march in June
George Chidi
Atlanta’s march concluded without incident, traveling down streets hallowed in civil rights history from the Atlanta Civic Center to the state capitol building about 1.2 miles away. At least 35 other affiliated No Kings Day protests demonstrations progressed across the state, from Brunswick near the Ice detention center in Folkston on Georgia’s southern border, to Dalton in the heart of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s northwest Georgia district.
Initial crowds of about 10,000 in Atlanta contracted a bit as the day progressed, but turnout was roughly equivalent to those in June in Atlanta, and more widely dispersed across the state.
Erik Malewaski, a college professor who lives in Marietta – where protests also had been planned – attended the Atlanta event anyway.
“I did the Marietta protest last time, and I wanted to see exactly what would go down here, particularly I thought we may get speakers like Warnock and Stacey Abrams.”
As well he did. Both Sen. Rev. Raphael Warnock and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Abrams described the actions of the federal government under President Donald Trump as fascist in plain terms.
“They want us to believe that we’re in danger if we speak up…that if we assemble like the First Amendment tells us we can, that there’s a problem,” Abrams said, arguing that the attacks on press freedoms and the firing of outspoken Trump critics like Karen Attiah and Jimmy Kimmel are discrete steps on a path to autocracy. “They want to break democracy forever.” said Abrams. “Their destination is to take our country from us.”
A panoply of speakers addressed both national problems such as draconian immigration enforcement and the erosion of civil liberties, as well as issues of sharp local concern, as when a representative of Play Fair ATL – a coalition of anti-homelessness advocates and rights groups – took the stage. Play Fair intends to hold Atlanta to commitments to refrain from sweeping homeless people from the city’s streets ahead of the World Cup next year, skeptical of mayor Andre Dickens resolve to resist demands by FIFA and Trump.
The suggestion that support for antifa – that is, antifascism – is tantamount to support for terrorism drew particular scorn from protesters.
“I think that’s absurd,” said Nicky Cooper, a software developer in Atlanta, She wore a shirt with an antifascist symbol on it to the rally. The labelling of people as somehow sympathetic to terrorism is chilling, she said. “I mean, we’re leaving a digital trail of this. You know? I have antifascism mentioned on my social media stuff. I mean, I’m not a ‘member’ of antifa, because how do you join antifa? So it’s like, who the hell are we looking for here?”
Comments by defense secretary Pete Hegseth to an assembly of high ranking military leaders last month featured prominently in the words of speakers and the reaction of protesters.
Brian Woods, 65, from Lawrenceville, is a former Army communications staff sergeant. “I thought it was unnecessary. It goes against what we know as military people.” He marveled at the decision to put that many leaders in the same room at the same time, potentially providing an immense military target to America’s enemies.
“He could have said that over one of their so-called secured lines,” a dig by a commo guy at Hegseth’s Signal chats. “They have a bulletproof mentality, so they just do things recklessly, without real thoughts that go into those types of conversations and communications.”
At the march in Los Angeles, Pam Hope, 62, wore a shirt emblazoned with the Statue of Liberty and the words: “I am Aunt Tifa.”
Hope said she came because she is deeply worried about the direction of the country under Donald Trump, but also to push back on Republican claims that the protests are un-American and that anti-Trump activists are part of “antifa”.
“I love America,” she said. “I just believe America should be against fascism and bigotry.”
Lauren Gambino
It was a dance party in Los Angeles down First Street as protesters moved and grooved around the caravan-like truck pulling a live band.
Parents toted kids in strollers, pet owners walked their pups on leashes and a group of seniors pushed uphill with their walkers – part of a march that stretched several blocks.
The Dark Knight made an appearance in the Batmobile. One protester wore a brown grizzly bear costume, which he said was a symbol of California’s resistance.
Another protester, Kimberly M, who was only comfortable sharing the first letter of her last name, carried a sign that said: “ICE in my horchata, not in my streets.”
Protest in Chicago 2 miles long
From Siri Chilukuri in Chicago:
Saturday’s No Kings protest in Chicago ended without incident with the last protestors filing into Grant Park around 3.45pm.
Along the route, drivers and Metra trains, the local commuter trains, honked in solidarity with protestors. One bus driver even put a Hands Off Chicago flyer on the dashboard.
People all over the Chicagoland area showed up for the rally and march, which Block Club Chicago reported was 2 miles long.
When protestors passed in front of Trump Tower, they flipped it off, as has become tradition, and shouted: “Shame! Shame! Shame!”
Deanthoni Wilkins, a 27-year-old medical student, was inspired by the magnitude of the protest.
“This is my second protest I’ve been to, and the largest I’ve been to, and it’s really inspiring to know I live in a place where people share [my] values,” said Wilkins.
The day so far
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More than 2,600 demonstrations are taking place throughout the US in protest of the Trump administration, dubbed the No Kings protest. The previous iteration that marched in June was one of the largest single days of protest in US history, and today looks to closely match that record.
-
Republican governors in several US states placed national guard troops on standby in preparation for the nationwide protests. Governors in Texas and Virginia have activated their state’s national guard troops.
-
Before the protests expected across all 50 states on Saturday, several protests in solidarity popped up across Europe.
-
Donald Trump told Fox News, “I’m not a king,” as millions across the US were about to march against his second presidency, uniting behind a message that the nation should halt its slide toward authoritarianism.
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Connecticut senator Chris Murphy called Donald Trump the “most corrupt president in the history of America” at a No Kings rally in Washington DC.
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In DC, Bernie Sanders headlined the event and gave various examples of Trump administration moves that he said put democracy at risk. He went on to denounce the billionaires who helped fund Trump’s campaign.
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In Chicago, mayor Brandon Johnson spoke at a rally, saying: “We will not bend, we will not bow, we will not cower, we will not submit.”
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The New York police department posted on social media that most rallies across the city had ended and that there had been no arrests, adding that more than 100,000 people had showed up to peacefully protest.
Here are some more images of other No Kings protests under way in several US states including North Carolina, Florida, Arizona and Vermont.
Lauren Gambino
Screenwriter and director Tony Gilroy, who created the Star Wars series Andor, was among the thousands of people who gathered in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday afternoon for the No Kings protest.
Andor, starring Diego Luna as the protagonist, follows Cassian Andor’s journey as a thief-turned-spy for the Rebel Alliance – the good guys whose ranks eventually go on to include characters such as Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia and Han Solo – in a crusade to take down the Galactic Empire.
“We spent six years making a show about the fascist takeover of a galaxy, far, far away,” he said. “We didn’t think we were making a documentary.”
Gilroy said the show offered a clear model for what authoritarian rule looks like – and how to resist it.
“We spent a lot of time thinking about sacrifice and courage, and the incremental encroachment of authoritarianism and how it works,” he said. “ I think I would have been here anyway, but the show has only amplified my understanding of it – my understanding of the sort of karaoke fascist playbook, but also my appreciation for the varieties of courage it takes for people to resist.”
Gilroy was dismayed by the “vacuum” of leadership among the anti-Trump resistance but saw reason to be hopeful as he looked out at the gathering crowd of Angelenos waving American flags and No Kings posters.
Rally in Portland turns into a massive march
Robert Mackey
The rally in Portland has turned into a massive march, with thousands of people now filling the city’s Hawthorne Bridge and the streets leading to the bridge.
I just witnessed a remarkable scene further back in the crowd, as protesters carrying handmade signs passed a trio of street performers, dressed as Donald Trump, whose head was entirely constructed of Cheetos and images of JD Vance and Kristi Noem.
Just behind the performers, a group of nine people in black clothing held a banner with the slogan “Organize to Attack the State” and chanted for insurrection and revolution.
At least one Portlander passing the group suggested that they looked like “fake antifa”.
Fake or not, they were massively outnumbered by a crowd that included hundreds of people in animal costumes, making the protest feel more like a carnival than anything at all threatening.
