Leaders of Saturday’s No Kings rallies across the country are predicting that the protests against the actions of President Donald Trump and his administration could add up to one of the largest demonstrations in U.S. history.
Organizers say more than 3,100 events have been registered in all 50 states, with more than 9 million people expected to participate. Previous No Kings days, in October and June, brought tens of thousands to the East Bay and west Contra Costa County.
On Saturday, there were events taking place in Richmond, El Sobrante and Pinole, among many East Bay cities. El Sobrante protest organizer Judy Weatherbee said, “I think this is the most successful one we’ve had.” There were an estimated 700 people there.
Erin Calentine, who teaches in Richmond and lives in Oakland, told Richmondside that Trump’s focus on immigrant enforcement efforts prompted her to attend the Richmond event, which drew an estimated 450 people.
“ICE itself is a human rights violation. The way that government is using ICE to crack down on immigrant rights, both of undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens is horrendous and fascist,” Calentine said.
Calentine said Richmond’s progressive moment has been amazing, pointing to the Richmond Progressive Alliance efforts. She encouraged locals to get involved and advocate for their rights.
“We really have so many progressives trying to make things better for so many people,” she said.
An independent study high schooler, Lilly Arikan, attended Richmond’s event to promote Progressives of Tomorrow, a student activist group started in Michigan that now has 20 chapters nationwide. She started a chapter with her classmates.
“I have a German mom and a Turkish dad, and I know what a dictatorship is doing to my dad’s country of Turkey, and everyone knows what it did to my mom’s country, obviously. So that’s why democracy is really important to me, and rule of law.”
One protest, in Oakland, included a march to PG&E to protest the utility’s contract with Palantir, led by the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment and three teach-ins: a Bay Resistance Noncooperation Teach-In at the main stage, outlining strategies for resisting authoritarianism; a teach-in supporting federal workers, led by the Federal Unionists Network; and a teach-in on the Oakland Arms Embargo campaign, which seeks to stop arms shipments to Israel from passing through Oakland Airport, led by Jewish Voice for Peace and the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, a campaign that has recently gained the support of Mayor Barbara Lee and the City of Richmond.
Protests were also planned for Pinole and Rodeo, where there will be a visibility brigade on the California Street bridge over Interstate 80 from 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Sue Separk of El Sobrante, who attended the downtown Richmond protest, said several issues prompted her to attend: the price of oil, the war in Iran and the health insurance crisis.
Toting a sign that said “Fund Healthcare, not Warfare,” she shared that her health insurance costs have skyrocketed thanks to changes Trump made to Obamacare.
“I was certainly negatively affected by the change in the rules to the ACA (Affordable Care Act,” Separk said. “Last year, my health insurance, I paid like $4,000 a year, now it’s $12,000. So we apparently have money for bombing people and schoolchildren but we do not have money for healthcare, and I don’t understand that.”
No Kings protests are being held across the country, and the globe
No Kings organizers designated the rally at the Minnesota Capitol in St. Paul as the national flagship event, in recognition of how the state where federal agents fatally shot two people who were monitoring Trump’s immigration crackdown became an epicenter of resistance.
Headlining that observance will be Bruce Springsteen, performing “Streets of Minneapolis,” which he wrote in response to the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and in tribute to the thousands of Minnesotans who took to the streets over the winter. Springsteen’s Land of Hope & Dreams American Tour, which has a “No Kings” theme, kicks off Tuesday in Minneapolis.
The White House dismissed the nationwide protests as the product of “leftist funding networks” with little real public support.
“The only people who care about these Trump Derangement Therapy Sessions are the reporters who are paid to cover them,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement.
Rallies are also planned in more than a dozen other countries, from Europe to Latin America to Australia, Ezra Levin, a co-executive director of Indivisible, a group spearheading the events, said in an interview. Countries with constitutional monarchies call the protests “No Tyrants,” he said.
For those unable to attend in person, another activist group, Stand Up For Science, is hosting a “virtual and accessible” event online.
On Saturday morning in Paris, several hundred people, mostly Americans living in France, along with French labor unions and human rights organizations, gathered at the Bastille.
“I protest all of Trump’s illegal, immoral, reckless, and feckless, endless wars,” Ada Shen, the Paris No Kings organizer, said. “It is clear he doesn’t really have a plan. It is clearly that the abuse of power is the point. It is very clear that he is a strong man who is abusing the authority vested in him by the American people as our elected president.”
In Rome, thousands of people marched with defiant chants aimed at Premier Giorgia Meloni, whose right-wing government saw its referendum for streamlining Italy’s judiciary badly fail earlier this week amid criticism that it was a threat to the courts’ independence. Protesters waved banners protesting the Israeli and US attacks on Iran, calling for “A world free from wars.”
U.S. organizers told reporters in an online news conference Thursday that they expect Saturday’s protests to be larger than the first two rounds of No Kings rallies, which they estimate drew more than 5 million people in June and more than 7 million in October.
“This administration’s actions are angering not just Democratic voters or folks in big blue city centers — they are crossing a line for people in red and rural areas, in the suburbs, all over the country,” said Leah Greenberg, the other co-executive director of Indivisible. “The defining story of this Saturday’s mobilization is not just how many people are protesting, but where they are protesting.”
Two-thirds of the RSVPs have come from outside of major urban centers, Greenberg said, listing registration surges in conservative-leaning states like Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Utah, South Dakota and Louisiana, as well in competitive suburban areas of Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona.
“Millions of us are rising up from all walks of life, from rural communities to big cities at No Kings,” said Katie Bethell, executive director of MoveOn, another major organizer. “And as we do so, we will send the loudest, clearest message yet that this country does not belong to kings, dictators, tyrants. It belongs to us.”
The Berkleyside staff and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
