Mass protests are starting to feel like a summer tradition in America. Just a week after a nationwide wave of “Families Belong Together” demonstrations against the Trump administration’s immigration policies, more civil disobedience flared up in multiple cities this weekend, focused on causes ranging from gun control to abolishing ICE. Highway were blocked, protesters arrested, and Mitch McConnell got harassed. Here’s a rundown:
Thousands of protesters marched in Chicago on Saturday to call attention to gun-related deaths and the need for jobs, education, and infrastructure in the city. The protesters shut down all northbound lanes on I-94 for about an hour. The marchers, organized by ChicagoStrong and led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Michael Pfleger, chanted “Stop the killing.” In the past year, 501 of Chicago’s 578 homicides have been shootings, according to the Chicago Tribune’s homicide tracker; most of the victims are black men in the city’s South and West sides.
Saturday also saw a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Rochester, New York, where 150 protesters shut down a major intersection and called for an end to police violence. The protesters wrote chalk messages on the streets and drew outlines of each other, to represent black lives lost to police violence. Sixteen protesters were arrested after they sat in the middle of a street downtown, according to authorities.
Gun control was the rallying cause for hundreds of people in Houston on Sunday. The protest, part of the national March for Our Lives tour organized by the Parkland students, came two months after 10 people were killed in a shooting at Santa Fe High School. The two-hour protest ended peacefully, according to news reports. One of the memorable exchanges occurred when David Hogg and other student activists spoke with gun rights counterprotesters.
Also on Sunday, dozens of protesters in Pittsburgh marched in response to last month’s fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Antwon Rose. Protesters carried a “Justice for Antwon” banner and walked to the area where Rose was shot, then continued to Route 30, where they shut down part of the highway. The peaceful demonstration was interrupted around 5 p.m. when a car drove through the crowd. Several protesters were hit but not badly hurt, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which captured video of police arresting the driver.
And an anti-ICE protest in Louisville, Kentucky, that had begun earlier in the week continued through Sunday, with nearly 200 protesters camped out near the agency’s office, according to NPR station WFPL. A day earlier, protesters confronted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as he was heading to his car after having lunch, according to the Louisville Courier Journal.
And the week is kicking off with more civil disobedience: On Monday morning, protesters in Columbus, Ohio, rallied to abolish the U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement, outside of the agency’s local office. At least 12 people were arrested for disorderly conduct—including a man who had duct-taped himself to the base of a tripod from which dangled a woman in a harness more than 30 feet above street level.
