No Kings, Just Water

It was a lovely day for a protest until the cops decided to riot.

Millions took to the streets on Saturday for No Kings Day, nationwide protests in cities big and small, timed to provide counter-programming for Donald Trump’s own military parade in Washington D.C.—an embarrassing spectacle that coincided with the president’s 79th birthday. Los Angeles, the second largest city in the country, had its own No Kings protest downtown that saw tens of thousands turn out. And it was incredible to witness firsthand how police can escalate a situation.

I’ve been to half a dozen protests in Southern California since Trump took office in January, none of which saw the police laying a finger on protesters. I saw hundreds march in downtown San Diego back in February to protest against the destruction of the federal government by Trump and his buddy Elon Musk; I’ve attended Tesla Takedown protests near one of the EV company’s retail stores where the main point of focus was on Musk, his Nazi-style salutes, and his illegal power grab; and I’ve seen hundreds of people lining the streets in Oceanside, not far from the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base, where veterans carried signs denouncing DOGE’s cuts.

The protest in Los Angeles this past Saturday had many of the same signs and sentiments that I’d seen at previous protests of the second Trump era, with a handful of important distinctions, even before you get to the violence committed by police. For starters, this was a protest heavily centered around the idea that ICE needs to stop terrorizing the community by breaking up families and arresting people who haven’t committed any crime. Other protests have been focused on Musk and Trump’s cuts to science funding and other vital services. But ICE is obviously front of mind in Los Angeles now, as federal agents continue to snatch people off the streets.

Then there’s the military presence. Roughly 4,000 members of the National Guard and 700 Marines are in Los Angeles, another well-publicized act that’s currently being litigated since Trump isn’t supposed to send troops into an American city without the presence of an insurrection. There’s a hearing on Tuesday to see if Trump gets to keep his troops in the city. It’ll be interesting to see whatever rationalization the U.S. Supreme Court eventually cooks up to let Trump keep doing whatever he likes.

But the thing that really made Saturday’s protest so unique, at least compared to all of the other protests I’ve attended during Trump’s second term, was the sense of community. And it feels like that’s perhaps the part of all this that’s not getting proper attention, as the photos of riot police and teargas make the front pages.

The first time I saw someone standing among the protesters on Saturday with a rolling cart of packaged snacks and water, I assumed it was just an anomaly. They were handing them out for free, after all, and there aren’t that many decent and altruistic people in the world. But by the third time I saw it, and confirmed the people didn’t know each other, it was clear something bigger was going on. These people really had spontaneously decided to show up and provide things for free—drinks, food, sunscreen, band-aids, masks—expecting nothing in return.

I talked with Hilaree Caldwell, who was happily standing in front of her cart with snacks and water Saturday afternoon, holding some sunscreen in one hand and a sign that read, “Authority should derive from consent of the governed, not from threat of force.” I asked her why she came out.

“My two friends up there, a few of us just got together and put together little wagons of food and decided to come out and help,” Caldwell said, turning to someone as we chatted, encouraging them to grab anything they wanted. Caldwell told me she’d been to protests before, but this was the first one where she and her friends decided they should bring some things to hand out.

“The sunscreen is a hit. The water obviously was the first thing to go, and the sunscreen is gonna probably be the next thing to go,” Caldwell said. “So yeah, we even have band-aids and pain reliever patches. It’s like, how’s your lower back right now? We have a pain patch for that.”

As we stood there talking, people came up to get a squirt of sunscreen. Others took a curious peek through the offerings. And one guy came up to ask if he could donate some extra things he had. Caldwell said anything was welcome.

“I think stuff like this is what allows us to rise up as a community, like a combined community together to keep our government from imploding and just sending us into a civil war,” Caldwell said. “I think protest is a way to do that. You can’t just be quiet.”

Admittedly, I didn’t think to ask Caldwell about the quote on her sign, assuming it was something from one of America’s founding fathers or perhaps a lefty activist from the early 20th century. It’s actually a line said by Barbie in Toy Story 3. And that felt appropriate given the setting. This city is, after all, one built on entertainment.

Aside from Caldwell’s offerings, I saw cars just randomly passing by in the crowded streets, handing out water, including young girls driven in an SUV by what I can only guess was their mother. They handed bottles out of the car windows to anyone and everyone. It was such a simple but revolutionary act to witness. And it was all so peaceful, as the cops, until that point, had kept their distance from the protest. They just circled their buildings and gave menacing looks.

Other protesters in cities across the country reported the same kind of things happening during No Kings Day. People had taken it upon themselves to offer free water and snacks, getting out there in a way that reinforces the idea that we have a community to protect in every corner of the country. And it really feels like that’s exactly what the police wanted to destroy on Saturday.

The Roybal federal building became ground zero for resistance against ICE detentions in Los Angeles a week earlier, on Friday, June 6, when people showed up to protest after hearing that perhaps 200 people were being detained in the facility, including children. The federal building isn’t designed to be a jail, but videos had started to leak out showing families being separated, with one particularly brutal video showing a father crying for his kid as the screams echo down the hallway.

That weekend, the protests grew, and I watched along as local L.A. stations livestreamed their coverage on YouTube. But watching live coverage, often from the vantage point of news helicopters that local L.A. TV news is so well known for, can give you a false sense that you’re seeing everything. Yes, you get a unique God’s-eye view of what’s taking place. But we gain a distance that can actually insulate us from the reality on the ground and convince our brains that we have the most objective perspective—cold, clinical, purely scientific. We think we’re getting the truest version of reality when it’s just the tiniest sliver of what makes a protest important. Or at least what made that protest on Saturday so important.

Being on the ground gives you those moments where complete strangers are asking if you need anything. Sunscreen? Water? It’s there and it’s free. One person had set up along the march route, as thousands walked through downtown, welcoming people to grab a snack or a bottle of water.

A few hours later, I came across another person with a cart and had to inquire about whether she was part of some organized group at the protest. She said she didn’t know who Hilaree was and she’d just come with a few friends to hand out water and snacks. They had small packs of Oreos and Cheez-It’s along with a couple cases of water. At least it was only a couple of cases when I finally came across them. They had no doubt gone through quite a few bottles by the time I reached their makeshift set-up on the sidewalk.

There were, of course, vendors selling things. Some sold flags, including U.S., Mexican, and Salvadoran. And there were the vendors selling the kinds of bacon-wrapped hot dogs you’d see anywhere in L.A., regardless of whether the people have taken to the streets against a fascist government. But it was the outpouring of free stuff that really made things feel so much different from a typical day.

The cops have their own version of events for No Kings Day. LAPD tweeted that officers were getting bottles thrown at them, their justification for replying with overwhelming force. And while I didn’t personally witness that, it’s perhaps important to note the context here. The intersection they claim where this happened was Temple and Spring, according to the tweet, an intersection where I saw no police when I walked by it to go from City Hall to the federal building before 4:00 p.m. The police only arrived at Temple and Spring by the time that tweet was sent, 5:36 p.m., after deploying munitions against the crowd, beating protesters from horseback, and sending everybody running. It’s entirely possible people had started throwing bottles at that point, since I’d backed away from the frontline, given the smoke and flashbangs deployed by police, but when you start shooting at people, they tend to fight back. There was no hint of violence before 4:00 p.m.

The cops on horses were reportedly California Highway Patrol and Los Angeles Metro Police, though that’s something I only learned after the fact. It’s really difficult to tell which particular brand of law enforcement is charging at you in a huge crowd. And given the way U.S. police have been militarized in the past two decades, it can even be difficult to tell the difference between members of the National Guard and every other police force in L.A. These guys all look like they’re straight out of a late 20th-century sci-fi dystopia, so at least the movies got that part right.

For his part, Trump has given conflicting messages on the future of his ICE raids and detentions. Late last week, he signaled he would ease up on ICE arrests of farm-workers and at businesses like meat-packing plants, suggesting he’d been lobbied by the agriculture industry. Their businesses were hurting, and immigrant labor has been crucial to feeding the nation. But Trump also posted to Truth Social on Sunday that he would continue his campaign of “remigration,” a term with neo-Nazi roots for ethnic cleansing.

Trump praised the federal agents Sunday and wrote that he would “expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside.” The president went on to say he would be targeting these huge cities because they’re “the core of the Democrat Power Center.” The president has clearly dug in on his idea that war should be waged against the cities and people who didn’t support him.

By Monday, the Washington Post reported that Trump’s apparent softening on immigration was a mirage and agents at the Department of Homeland Security had been told there would be no easing of the regime’s brutal immigration enforcement. No exemptions, no amnesty. Everyone had to go. Even the 9-year-olds like Martin Issac Garcia-Benegas.

It can perhaps seem silly to fixate so much on people handing out water and helping total strangers with free stuff. Mutual aid isn’t a new idea, obviously. And there was so much more going on that local news outlets rightly considered more newsworthy. The cops on horseback who charged and fired so-called “less lethal” munitions into the crowd; the drones buzzing overhead; the chants and sometimes profane signs; and the anger, so much anger directed at ICE, Trump, and yes, still Elon Musk. I saw a protest sign Saturday depicting a man standing in front of a row of Cybertrucks, clearly mimicking the “tank man” photo of Tiananmen Square in 1989. The last time I saw a similar sign was a protest outside the Richard M. Nixon Library in Yorba Linda back in May. Musk has given the appearance that he’s had a falling out with Trump, but his businesses still heavily rely on government funding. And he’s still clearly on everyone’s mind.

For whatever it’s worth, I didn’t hear a dispersal order that was supposedly issued around 4 p.m., which apparently allowed the authorities to start the violence that would ensue. I saw some people yelling at the federal troops at the federal building, but nobody was throwing anything. And then the crowd started to panic. All of these things you can read about elsewhere from that God’s-eye view that’s supposed to be so impartial. Or you can hear it from the other people who were on the ground, like MSNBC, which also noted that the cops started the violence with no visible provocation.

But it was the free water bottles that stuck with me after I got out of the area shortly before the mayor-imposed curfew at 8 p.m. Because that’s what doesn’t make headlines when the teargas has dissipated for the night. And it’s the thing that you’ll never see on Fox News or in Trump’s unhinged tweets about a city supposedly on fire. The free water and the little girl handing them out before the cops decided it was enough.