Maryland activists expect thousands for peaceful 'No Kings Day' protests Saturday against Trump policies
Protests are scheduled across Maryland Saturday from Annapolis to Bel Air, as part of the nationwide "No Kings" movement to challenge the policies of President Trump.
You can find more information on all events here.
Baltimore demonstration
One of the largest events will be in Patterson Park from 3 pm to 7 pm.
"Let's just show up as Baltimoreans and show strength together," said Ellie Rosenstock, who organized it.
She told WJZ Investigator Mike Hellgren it will be contained within the park and is a way for everyday citizens to gather in solidarity against the Trump Administration.
"I really do believe that a lot of us are feeling the same, no matter who we voted for—even if you voted for Donald Trump. I don't personally believe that anyone thought 'Hey, we're going to have military in the streets,' and I don't think anyone thought, 'Hey, we might not have due process of law.' So, I don't think anybody was voting for that," Rosenstock said.
Her organization, 'Indivisible Baltimore', started before Trump's inauguration and quickly grew.
"Our first meeting, there were five people. The next meeting, there were 25 people. And the next meeting, there were 225 people. Now, we have over 2,000 people who are a part of this," she said.
She stressed the event is peaceful and family-friendly. It is set to include Baltimore City Council President Zeke Cohen, Council Member Odette Ramos, and U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen.
"Even if you're not a person who is political and you've not gone to a protest before, that's not what this is. We're completely peaceful, regular people just coming out," Rosenstock said.
She told Hellgren the event would take place near the observatory and the basin, and at some point, people would march around the park.
Military Parade in Washington, D.C.
President Trump authorized the multi-million-dollar parade in the nation's capital to celebrate his 79th birthday and the 250th anniversary of the Army.
"I don't think the president doing a parade in the middle of Washington, D.C. to coincide with his birthday is the best use of time, energy or resources, but I do think it's important for people to go out and remember what an important contribution the United States Army has made to our nation," Governor Wes Moore, a Democrat, told WJZ Friday.
Earlier this week, the government brought in military vehicles by the thousands to Jessup. They will parade through the streets of Washington.
"If there's money for a parade, then there's money for Medicaid, so it really kind of says it all right there," Rosenstock remarked.
Harford County protest
A protest in Bel Air is scheduled from noon to 2 pm Saturday on Churchville Road across from the office of Congressman Andy Harris.
"I think we're going to have an amazing turnout, especially in this red area of Harford County. I think it doesn't matter about party at this point. We are talking about the values of our country and how they are being violated over and over and over again," said DeLane Lewis of Together We Will Harford County. "This is a peaceful protest. That is what is happening here—a peaceful exercise of our First Amendment rights, and there will be no violence."
Harris is the only Republican in Maryland's Congressional delegation.
"For us, our goal is to get the message to Congress—particularly to our Congressman Andy Harris, who has done nothing and has allowed this rampant abuse of executive power with no restraint," Lewis said.
WJZ reached out to Harris' office for comment, but he has yet to respond.
Maryland Governor Moore's full statement
Late Friday, Governor Moore issued the following statement to WJZ about the demonstrations:
"Over the weekend, thousands of Marylanders will gather to exercise their guaranteed and hard-fought-for First Amendment freedoms. I swore an oath to protect these sacred rights both when I joined the United States Army and when I was sworn in as the 63rd Governor of Maryland. The ability to freely speak out and assemble is a cornerstone of American democracy—and one of our greatest heirlooms as a state and nation. Multiple departments and agencies of Maryland state government have been carefully monitoring upcoming rallies throughout the week. Safety is our highest priority, and our administration has been in close coordination with both community leaders and law enforcement in service of keeping our people and neighborhoods safe. We are a state that will protect the rights of the people and also uphold the law."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNN
28 minutes ago
- CNN
‘Always a peacemaker': How Trump decided to hold off on striking Iran
By most accounts, President Donald Trump's attention for the past week has been consumed by the spiraling crisis playing out between Israel and Iran. In between meetings in Canada on Monday, he peppered aides for constant updates. He has spent more time in the basement Situation Room this week than at any point so far in his new presidency. So it was somewhat jarring Wednesday when the president emerged from the South Portico — not to provide an update on his crisis consultations, but to oversee the installation of two nearly 100-foot flagpoles. 'These are the best poles anywhere in the country, or in the world, actually. They're tapered. They have the nice top,' the president told a clutch of reporters and workmen. 'It's a very exciting project to me.' The break from his Iran meetings lasted about an hour, a moment for the president to literally touch grass on the South Lawn amid the most consequential period of decision-making of his term so far. A day later, the president decided not to decide. He dictated a statement to his press secretary Karoline Leavitt announcing he would hold off ordering a strike on Iran for up to two weeks to see if a diplomatic resolution was possible. The decision was revealed after another meeting in the Situation Room, where the president has spent much of this week reviewing attack plans and quizzing officials about the potential consequences of each. After steadily ratcheting up his martial rhetoric – including issuing an urgent warning to evacuate the 10 million residents of Iran's capital – Trump's deferment provides the president some breathing room as he continues to work through options presented by his military officials over the past several days. It also allows more time for the divergent factions of his own party to make their case directly to the president for and against a strike, as they have been urgently doing since it became clear Trump was seriously considering dropping bombs on Iran's nuclear facilities. The president has refused to pick a side in public and spent the last week alternating between militaristic threats issued on social media and private concerns that a military strike he orders could drag the US into prolonged war. Around the Situation Room table, he has relied principally on his CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine to discuss his options, according to people familiar with the matter. His foreign envoy Steve Witkoff has been corresponding with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi to determine if room exists to restart the diplomacy that had been deadlocked before Israel began its campaign last week. Other officials have been publicly sidelined. Twice this week, Trump has dismissed assessments previously offered by his Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard about the state of Iran's program to develop a nuclear weapon. Gabbard testified in March that the US intelligence community had assessed Iran was not building such a weapon; Trump flatly and publicly disputed that Friday. 'Well then, my intelligence community is wrong,' Trump told reporters in New Jersey, asking the reporter who in the intelligence community had said that. Told that it was Gabbard, Trump responded, 'She's wrong.' Yet as he weighs taking action that could have consequences for years to come, Trump appears to be relying mostly on his own instincts, which this week told him to hit pause on ordering a strike that could alter global geopolitics for years to come. When top national security officials told Trump during a meeting at Camp David earlier this month that Israel was prepared to imminently strike inside Iran, it wasn't necessarily a surprise. Trump's advisers had been preparing for months for the possibility Israel could seize upon a moment of Iranian weakness — its regional proxies have been decimated over the past year — to launch a direct assault. Trump's team arrived at Camp David having already drawn up options for potential US involvement. According to people familiar with the matter, his advisers resolved differences between themselves in advance before presenting possible plans to the president. From the mountainside presidential retreat, Trump also spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who told the president he intended to begin a campaign in Iran imminently. Ten days later, with the Israeli campaign now in full swing, Trump was meeting in Canada with top American allies from the Group of 7, who hoped to decipher from him what the American plan was going forward. In closed-door meetings, leaders from Europe tried to ascertain whether Trump was inclined to order up a US strike on Fordow, the underground nuclear facility that has been the focus of attention for American war planners, western officials said. They also tried to convince a begrudging Trump to sign on to a joint statement, which urged that 'the resolution of the Iranian crisis leads to a broader de-escalation of hostilities in the Middle East.' Trump did not reveal his hand, either in private sessions with individual leaders or over dinner at the Kananaskis Country Golf Course, the western officials said. Instead, he left the summit early, leaving his counterparts in the Canadian Rockies and returning to Washington to deal with the matter himself. By midweek, with only vague signs from Iran that it was willing to restart talks, Trump's patience appeared to wearing thin for finding a diplomatic solution. And many of his allies believed he was on the verge of ordering a strike on Iran. 'It's very late, you know?' he said at Wednesday's flagpole event, the heat causing his forehead to glisten. 'It's very late to be talking.' In private meetings that day, Trump appeared convinced of the necessity of taking out the Fordow facility, according to people familiar with the conversations. And he said in public only the United States has the firepower to do it. 'We are the only ones who have the capability to do it, but that doesn't mean I am going to do it,' Trump said after coming back inside from his flag raising. 'I have been asked about it by everybody but I haven't made a decision.' He was speaking from the Oval Office, where he'd gathered players from the Italian soccer club Juventus to stand behind him. They mostly acted as a fidgeting backdrop to Trump's question-and-answer session on his Iran decision-making. At one point, Trump turned to the players amid a discussion of the B-2 stealth bomber — the only jet that could carry a bunker-busting bomb to destroy Iran's underground enrichment facility. 'You can be stealthy — you'll never lose, right?' he asked the team members, none of whom responded. 'It was a bit weird. When he started talking about the politics with Iran and everything, it's kind of, like… I just want to play football, man,' one of the players, Timothy Weah, said afterward. Amid the string of events, Trump continued to weigh the choices in front of him, and remained worried about a longer-term war. And he continued to receive messages from all sides of his political coalition, which has been divided over the wisdom of launching a strike that could embroil the US in a war for years to come. He's taken repeated calls from GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, a prominent voice in support of striking Iran who described the president as 'very focused, very calm' after a Tuesday night phone call. 'I feel like when he says no nukes for Iran, he means it,' Graham said the next day. 'He gave them a chance for diplomacy. I think they made a miscalculation when it comes to President Trump.' One of the most prominent voices opposing a strike, his onetime top strategist Steve Bannon, was at the White House midday Thursday for a lunch with the president that had been rescheduled from several weeks ago. He revealed nothing of his conversation with Trump on his 'War Room' show later Thursday. But a day earlier, he told a roundtable that getting involved in a drawn-out conflict with Iran would amount to repeating a historic mistake. 'My mantra right now: The Israelis have to finish what they started,' he said at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast. 'We can't do this again. We'll tear the country apart. We can't have another Iraq.' For Trump, the swirl of options, opinions and advice is nothing new. He has faced the Iran decision much as he has most every other major choice of his presidency, by soliciting advice and trying to arrive at a solution that will please the widest swath of his supporters. The answer this time may not be as simple, nor does Trump hold all the cards in a conflict that is playing out across the world. Israel's decision to launch strikes a week ago — while not a surprise to the president — still came against his public entreaties to hold off. And in Iran, he is confronting an adversary with a long history of hardening its positions under pressure from the United States. As he was arriving Friday at his home in New Jersey, Trump said it would be hard to ask Netanyahu to ease up on strikes on Iran in order to pursue diplomacy, given Israel's success in the conflict so far. And he said the two-week window he set a day earlier was the maximum period of time he would allow for diplomacy to work, reserving the option of ordering a strike before that time is up. The president couldn't say whether the decision now in front of him is the biggest he'd face as president. But as he tries to find the balance between ending Iran's nuclear ambitions and keeping the US from war, he did offer an evaluation of what he wanted his legacy to be on the other side. 'Always a peacemaker,' he said. 'That doesn't mean — sometimes, you need some toughness to make peace. But always a peacemaker.'
Yahoo
29 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Judge rules Trump administration can't require states to help on immigration to get transport money
BOSTON (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday blocked the Trump administration from withholding billions of dollars in transportation funds from states that don't agree to participate in some immigration enforcement actions. Twenty states sued after they said Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy threatened to cut off funding to states that refused to comply with President Donald Trump's immigration agenda. U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. barred federal transportation officials from carrying out that threat before the lawsuit is fully resolved. 'The Court finds that the States have demonstrated they will face irreparable and continuing harm if forced to agree to Defendants' unlawful and unconstitutional immigration conditions imposed in order to receive federal transportation grant funds,' wrote McConnell, the chief judge for the federal district of Rhode island. 'The States face losing billions of dollars in federal funding, are being put in a position of relinquishing their sovereign right to decide how to use their own police officers, are at risk of losing the trust built between local law enforcement and immigrant communities, and will have to scale back, reconsider, or cancel ongoing transportation projects.' Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell, in a statement posted on Bluesky, welcomed the ruling. 'The court granted a temporary order halting the Trump administration's attempt to hold critical funding for states if they don't comply with their cruel immigration policies,' Campbell said. This would have put critical funding for transportation in MA at risk. It's not just wrong – it's illegal." In statement posted on X, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said the ruling wasn't surprising. 'I directed states who want federal DOT money to comply with federal immigration laws,' Duffy said. 'But, no surprise, an Obama-appointed judge has ruled that states can openly defy our federal immigration laws. This is judicial activism pure and simple and I will continue to fight in the courts.' On April 24, states received letters from the Department of Transportation stating that they must cooperate on immigration efforts or risk losing the congressionally appropriated funds. No funding was immediately withheld, but some of the states feared the move was imminent. Attorneys general from California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, Wisconsin and Vermont filed the lawsuit in May, saying the new so-called 'Duffy Directive' put them in an impossible position. 'The States can either attempt to comply with an unlawful and unconstitutional condition that would surrender their sovereign control over their own law enforcement officers and reduce immigrants' willingness to report crimes and participate in public health programs — or they can forfeit tens of billions of dollars of funds they rely on regularly to support the roads, highways, railways, airways, ferries, and bridges that connect their communities and homes,' the attorneys general wrote in court documents. But acting Rhode Island U.S. Attorney Sara Miron Bloom told the judge that Congress has given the Department of Transportation the legal right to set conditions for the grant money it administers to states, and that requiring compliance and cooperation with federal law enforcement is a reasonable exercise of that discretion. Allowing the federal government to withhold the funds while the lawsuit moves forward doesn't cause any lasting harm, Bloom wrote in court documents, because that money can always be disbursed later if needed. But requiring the federal government to release the money to uncooperative states will likely make it impossible to recoup later, if the Department of Transportation wins the case, Bloom said.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Large crowds demonstrate, march at anti-Trump 'No Kings' protest in Denver
Large crowds peacefully gathered in front of the Colorado State Capitol in Denver Saturday to take part in one of several anti-Trump 'No Kings' rallies in Colorado and across the country.
