‘No Kings’ protests suddenly take on a greater urgency

The rampant militarization of immigration raids makes the stakes clearer than ever

It’s shaping up to be a hot summer for the anti-Trump movement.

The long-scheduled “No Kings” protests across the nation on Saturday have taken on a new and enormous sense of urgency in the wake of Trump’s militarization of his anti-immigration crusade and the ensuing protests in Los Angeles and other cities.

Trump’s actions have made the threat posed by a police state clearer than ever. By sending his masked and heavily armed ICE agents into blue neighborhoods -- and then taking the wildly extra-legal step of ordering the National Guard and Marines to back them up -- Trump has effectively thrown gasoline on a smoldering movement.

Thousands of people responded by marching against ICE in New York, Chicago, and Atlanta on Tuesday afternoon, with more protests planned for today in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, Minneapolis, San Antonio and Seattle.

And while Trump has tried to cast the small-scale rioting in Los Angeles as an existential threat to the country (see my Press Watch column on how the media is abetting him), in fact it’s the ICE agents and law enforcement who are committing the most violent acts – gratuitously assaulting protesters (and journalists) with flash-bang grenades, tear gas, and rubber bullets.

Why Protest on Saturday

There are now over 1,800 “No Kings” protests nationwide taking place on Saturday – considerably more even than the “Hands Off” protests that brought a total of somewhere between 1 and 3 million people out into the streets.

The timing – set to counter-program Trump’s obscenely self-indulgent military parade on his birthday – now seems particularly propitious.

I urge you to read this post by Leah Greenberg, a co-founder of Indivisible, part of the “No Kings” coalition, answering the question: “What is it going to accomplish?”

“A single mobilization won’t turn this ship around. But it can do a few very important things,” she writes:

Change the narrative. A massive show of popular opposition everywhere in the country can disrupt Trump’s effort to project strength. It shows that resistance is big, powerful, growing, and everywhere.

Bring in new people. A mobilization of this scale and scope reaches people who aren’t yet engaged, and — if done right — helps to draw them into a cycle of action and relationships on the ground.

Foster community. When you show up, you realize that not only are you not alone — you’re actually part of something enormous. And that helps to build the shared sense of identity we’ll need for the path ahead.

Spread courage. After Hands Off!, we heard from people in positions of power within institutions — law firms, universities (one big university, in fact), and elsewhere — who told us they were emboldened by the protests to push back on pressure from the Trump regime. As we often say, courage is contagious.

Want to go? Common Cause is holding an Event attendee pre-mobilization call on Thursday at 8 pm ET/5 pm PT to “provide timely updates, walk through key messaging guidance, and share best practices on how to prepare for participation in the mass mobilization on June 14th.”

Want to help? There’s a No Kings host call tonight at 7:30pm ET/4:30pm PT, leading directly into marshal training, where organizers will “equip you with essential skills for a smooth and secure mobilization, covering practical tips on crowd management, incident response, and key safety protocols.”

The Summer Ahead

Boosters like Ben Meiselas see this as the beginning of something big. “This will be known as ‘Democracy Summer,’” Meiselas writes. “We are going to see the largest mass peaceful protests in the history of the country. I can tell that’s where we are headed.”

Pundit Steve Schmidt predicts that “the political temperature will rise in America over the next 90 days as the heat index soars. The cost of MAGA will start coming due, and it will be brutal.”

I reached out to a few sociologists who have studied social movements to get their sense of where things are going from here.

NYU sociology professor Jeff Goodwin told me he expects the protests to increase. “Most movements grow during the summer, and this one should be no different. The weather is better and people have more free time, especially students and teachers. And I think Trump will continue to enact provocative and unpopular policies,” he wrote in an email.

But Yale sociology professor Ronald Eyerman was more skeptical. “Although there are daily signs of a growing anti-Trump protest movement in the US, there are several indicators that make me doubt these will evolve into a coordinated mass movement over the summer,” he wrote in an email.

One problem is that the Democratic Party’s organizational base is key to turning protests into something larger, and the party has been “slow to recuperate from the election loss” he wrote.

Summer is also a slow time for college-based protests. And, he pointed out, even during the school year, colleges were quieted by “the divisive forces of the question of Palestine and the fears that the aggressive policies of the Trump administration have triggered amongst students and administrators.”

Furthermore, he wrote, some people are too scared to come out. “With ICE acting like a paramilitary force, public exposure through protest is very risky for those on the margins.”

So what’s their advice going forward?

“Don't just oppose Trump and MAGA,” wrote Goodwin. “Offer an alternative pro-people program. [Bernie] Sanders and AOC are doing this and drawing large crowds.”

And Eyerman urged organizers to “find some symbolic forms that represent the beliefs that ground this protest -- songs, flags, slogans, etc, -- that identify the collective values the movement stands for.”

Any ideas? Share them in comments.

Is Some Violence Understandable?

Trump and his allies have riled up their base with video and pictures from LA of cars on fire and people throwing rocks.

Some of those images have raised concerns within the protest community itself, especially among those who fear they hand the administration the pretext to escalate further.

In a powerful essay on the nature of violence, writer and activist Rebecca Solnit calls for solidarity among the resistance rather than internal squabbling about tactics. “We are escalating because they are escalating,” she writes.

She explains:

Here it's also useful to make a distinction between property damage (which protesters in the USA in our era have done from time to time) and harming living beings (which is largely something done by law enforcement in these demonstrations). …

All I've read about so far in L.A. is property damage by protesters, while we've seen many kinds of violence and intimidation from the heavily armored and armed thugs serving the Trump Administration's war on immigrants. …

I believe ardently that nonviolent resistance is in the big picture and the long term the most effective strategy, but that doesn't mean it must be polite, placid, or please our opponents, not least because nothing ever will and they'll lie and distort no matter what.

And, she writes:

I also believe that those of us who are older, whiter, safer from the threats of state violence do not have the moral ground to lecture the younger, browner and blacker, more directly impacted on what they should and should not do.

Veteran journalist Marc Cooper similarly argues that some violence is inevitable:

Not have I ever seen great movements of liberation and self-determination anywhere in the world that were 100% non-violent. Never. Anywhere. By definition these movements are battling oppression and oppression generates rage no matter how mature and wise the leadership of those movements might be. …

Nor is the violence symmetrical. Tossing a bottle or a firecracker at a phalanx of battle-dressed federal and local officers pales before the threat of violence they emit wearing helmets, shields, body armor, side-arms, long rifles, tasers, zip ties, batons, tear gas and pepper ball launchers, pepper spray, and in some cases war-worthy long guns. …

In the meantime, I am focused not on some kid tossing a rock or even setting a cop car on fire. I am much more fixated on the violence both present and threatened by a rogue administration peopled by convicts, sociopaths, grifters and fascists. Save your moral outrage for them as they are the guilty parties here.

Lawsuits Watch

• In Newsom v. Trump, the state of California is asking a federal judge to block the Trump administration’s deployment of National Guard members and Marines to Los Angeles. “The federal government is now turning the military against American citizens,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement. “Sending trained warfighters onto the streets is unprecedented and threatens the very core of our democracy. Donald Trump is behaving like a tyrant, not a President.”

• A coalition of immigrant-rights and defense lawyers has filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge to invalidate the agreement between the U.S. and El Salvador that enabled the transfer of hundreds of people to a notorious Salvadoran prison. “Disappearing people into foreign black sites is unAmerican,” said Democracy Forward president Skye Perryman. “It is not immigration policy — it’s an abuse of power typical of autocratic regimes and a direct violation of the U.S. Constitution, federal law, and human rights.”

• Citing Kafka’s “The Trial” in his opinion, D.C. federal judge James Boasberg ordered the U.S. Government to give 137 Venezuelan immigrants who were deported to El Salvador in March the due process they were denied. “Perhaps the President lawfully invoked the Alien Enemies Act. Perhaps, moreover, Defendants are correct that Plaintiffs are gang members. But — and this is the critical point — there is simply no way to know for sure, as the CECOT Plaintiffs never had any opportunity to challenge the Government’s say-so,” Boasberg wrote. (A D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals panel of three Trump judges on Tuesday temporarily paused Boasberg’s order.)

• A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reinstate programs funded by AmeriCorps grants in the 24 states and Washington, D.C., that sued to stop deep cuts made by Elon Musk’s so-called “DOGE Service.”

Muted Response to Trump’s New Travel Ban

Adam Serwer writes in the Atlantic that “The first time President Donald Trump tried to institute a travel ban to prevent large numbers of immigrants and visitors from reaching the United States, back in 2017, massive protests erupted at major airports across the country. This time, at least so far, there has been nothing of the sort. The disparity in reactions helps illustrate how habituated Americans have become to a president who wields his power with discriminatory intentions.”

He concludes that “Trumpism is a kind of authoritarian autoimmune disease, one that has been ravaging the American body politic for so long that there are fewer small-d democratic antibodies left to fight it off.”

Robert Tait, writing in the Guardian, calls the muted response “illustrative of how successful the president has been in shifting the Overton window of political acceptability compared with eight years ago.”

End Notes

• More than 80 employees of the National Institutes of Health have bravely signed a scathing letter condemning “Administration policies that undermine the NIH mission, waste public resources, and harm the health of Americans and people across the globe.”

• Lambda Legal, the LGBTQ+ civil rights organization, has raised a staggering $285 million “to expand and extend its fight for equality in the courts today and for generations to come.” That’s over $100M more than its initial goal, and makes it by far the largest fundraising initiative in the history of the LGBTQ+ movement.

• In what may or may not be another intentional effort to counter-program Trump’s military parade, Pope Leo XIV will make a virtual appearance at a sold-out Chicago White Sox baseball stadium on Saturday afternoon, delivering his “message of peace, unity and the key to a meaningful life.”