From a flash-mob in Bennington to a state-long relay up Route 7, Vermonters in more than thirty cities and towns turned out on Saturday as part of "No Kings Day" — a nationwide protest of the Trump administration.
The group 50501 Vermont organized the events, which took place ahead of a military parade in Washington D.C., a recent addition to the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary event. June 14 is also Flag Day, and Donald Trump’s birthday. (Another event on Saturday, organized by former Republican candidate for lieutenant governor Gregory Thayer, invited people to eat cake on the Statehouse lawn and “celebrate three birthdays.”)
At the largest No Kings Day gathering along the Burlington Waterfront, several thousand people sang together, chanted slogans and listened to speakers.
Dozens also staged a “die-in” to protest the presidential administration’s policies, from budget cuts to Medicaid to intensified immigration enforcement to clawing back funds from universities and scientific research.
In the crowd were childhood best friends Haley Frink, 31, and Tinesha Schaer, 30, who live in Bristol and Burlington. This was their first time attending a protest together.
“I have two daughters, and I'm just worried that they're not going to have a safe place to grow up in,” Schaer said. “Their rights are going to be gone.”
“I come from a line of Republicans in my family, and I'm breaking the tradition by just being aware of what's going on,” Fink said. “I don't really care about sides. I just care about the people around us.”
It is an urgent time for every American – regardless of political persuasion – to advocate for this country’s freedoms, said Vermont Congresswoman Becca Balint as she took the stage on Saturday.
“Our democracy and our rights and our laws are under threat daily, not just by Donald Trump, but all of the apologists and enablers who go along with it,” she said. “They've gone after judges. They've gone after students. They've gone after legal residents.”
The rally's speakers included White River Junction resident Mohsen Mahdawi, a lawful permanent citizen, who was detained by federal immigration authorities at what he was told would be a naturalization interview in Colchester.
The Trump administration said Mahdawi should be deported because his pro-Palestinian activism threatened its foreign policy goals. A federal judge, however, ordered his release after two weeks of detention in Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans.
Mahdawi told the Burlington Waterfront crowd on Saturday that his imprisonment was a silencing of his work toward peace.
“A work for peacemaking, to see our world free of wars, free of trauma, free of pain,” he said. “The world is seeing the truth that killing children is not acceptable, a genocide is not acceptable, wiping out a whole population is not acceptable, starting wars is not acceptable. And we say it not out of anger, we say it not out of fear. We say it out of love, a love for our humanity.”
The same desire for humanity, a “longing to coexist,” was what brought out Martha Ala Penzer, a 72-year-old Burlington resident and child of Holocaust survivors, to No Kings Day.
“My parents raised us with a passionate conviction that war is the worst malice known to humanity, and that human beings can be manipulated to hate each other, whether it's here in the United States or in the Middle East,” Penzer said.
She said her heart aches to hear about starving children in Gaza – and to hear about U.S. immigration authorities arresting people working in the U.S. food, health care and construction industries.
Midway through the event on Saturday, the farmworker advocacy organization Migrant Justice announced that Border Patrol had arrested and detained a family in Franklin County.
Migrant Justice later said in a statement that Jose Ignacio "Nacho" De La Cruz, 29, was driving with his 18-year-old stepdaughter Heidy Perez along Route 105 in Richford when agents pulled them over and "smashed their car window and violently detained the two community leaders."
Migrant Justice noted that De La Cruz, a former dairy worker and a current worker-owner at construction firm New Frameworks, has been advocating in the Statehouse for years. The group said that Perez has also been active in campaigning for immigrant rights, that she graduated from Milton High School less than a week ago, and that she's hoping to enroll in Vermont State University in the fall.
Abel Luna with Migrant Justice asked the protest crowd to rally outside the U.S. Customs and Border Protection building in Richford.
“We want to make sure that they know that we're standing together and we're not going to let them do this,” Luna said. “We're not going to allow Trump to separate our families.”
CBP did not respond to Vermont Public’s request about the reason for the arrest.
Spokespeople for CBP and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement also did not respond to an email seeking the location of 10 construction workers who were detained in Newport two weeks ago. The Vermont Asylum Assistance Project said in statement earlier this week that the whereabouts of those workers were unknown and that this was “part of a broader erosion of due process in immigration proceedings.”
