Protests, police and persuasion
Despite public outcry, the authoritarian juggernaut of Trump and Republicans steamrolls on.
If you appreciate this post, which includes reporting from Ohio from American Doom intern and reporter Chloe Hall, please consider a paid subscription to support our independent journalism.
HAMILTON, Ohio — Early Saturday afternoon, a small group of protesters gathered at Marcum Park in this small town just north of Cincinnati to speak out about sweeping cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.
The event on Saturday came just a week after area law enforcement clashed with protesters calling for the release of Ayman Soliman, the chaplain of the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital who has had his asylum revoked by the Trump administration, remains in detention here, and is slated for deportation to Egypt, where he faces death threats.
While the protest on July 17 that led to conflict with area law enforcement was, like many around the country in recent months, focused on immigration, Saturday’s protests focused on another front in President Donald Trump’s efforts to remake the U.S. in a more authoritarian image — historic and drastic cuts to the social safety net that critics say are entirely unnecessary.
Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” will cut federal health programs and other government spending by $1.4 trillion over the next 10 years while increasing the national debt by $3 trillion thanks to tax cuts to wealthy Americans. In the process, tens of millions of Americans are expected to lose access to healthcare.
Republicans have said the cuts will only affect those who are improperly taking advantage of the programs, but government studies have shown that improper payments under Medicare and Medicaid recipients are rare — less than 10 percent of all payments made under the program. Of that small percentage, an even smaller amount reflects fraud perpetrated by recipients.
The protesters in Ohio held signs — “We the People Serve No King, and ”R.I.P. Died Waiting for Medicare” — as they walked to the intersection of Market St. and Riverfront Plaza.
Despite a heavy downpour, the protest still drew 22 people, their brief march prompting some honks of support from those driving by. The event was one of several around the country organized, in part, by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)
“Stand up, fight back!” the crowd in Hamilton, just outside Cincinnati, chanted in unison. “We will not stop, we will not rest!”
“We’re trying to show that there’s massive pushback to the administration’s cuts, whether it be SNAP, Medicare, Medicaid, TanF,” Bryce Dawson, a community activist and organizer with the Workers’ Justice Committee, said. “We need to fund our schools, we need to fund our public education, we need to fund our public healthcare.”
Part of the event’s purpose was to warn Americans that the cuts will take effect in the near future.
“These cuts and a lot of these restrictions won’t be put in place until two years from now.” Dawson said, “We don’t want people to lose sight of when they are unable to get healthcare, to get food stamps and who’s responsible for that.”
The cuts under H.R. 1 are part of a dramatic realignment of U.S. posture on domestic and international policies enacted by the Trump administration and congressional Republicans. Since taking office in January, Trump has issued dozens of executive orders aimed at reducing aid to foreign nations and spending at home, including granting unprecedented authority to Elon Musk and his DOGE team to root out supposed “fraud, waste and abuse.”
Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, have been busy cutting spending on social services while helping the National debt to explode thanks to skyrocketing budgets for the military and immigration enforcement. H.R. 1 increases federal spending by $325 billion, primarily for immigration agencies and the military, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.
The result has been a U.S. government fundamentally changed from its predecessors, realigned to meet the far-right goals prescribed by groups like the Heritage Foundation, through its Project 2025, and influential billionaires like Musk and Peter Thiel, who envision the future as a Darwinian culling to benefit those already possessing vast power and wealth.
Jeff Dringer, political research strategist with SEIU district 1199, explained that the protests taking place on Saturday were “in response to the attacks on working families and working people that have happened under this administration.”
The Trump administration's gutting of the social safety net is just one front in an exhausting campaign to remake the U.S. in Trump’s and Republican’s authoritarian vision. Perhaps a more obvious front are the masked immigration agents who continue to terrorize communities under strict deportation quotas as part of a new police state that is only set to grow thanks to H.R. 1’s additional ICE funding.
Protests and daily interventions between Americans and Trump’s masked agents are now part of everyday life.
On July 17, 15 people, including two journalists, were arrested at a protest for Soliman. Police from nearby Covington, Kentucky say that the small group of protesters became violent, but some videos from the protest show police as the instigators, beating a man and indiscriminately firing non-lethal weapons at protesters who in many cases had their hands up or were walking away.
Dringer noted that Saturday’s “Family First” event, while focused on healthcare cuts, was in line with the broader goals of protests for Soliman. “Snatching people off the streets is not really families first,” Dringer told American Doom.
Dru Batte, a community activist with the Workers’ Justice Committee, said the events of last weekend were “an egregious show of police force and inhumane violence [that] was committed against people exercising their First Amendment right.”
***
Secret police, free speech crackdowns, expanding immigration dragnet
The officers with the Covington Police Department who beat and fired on protesters on July 17 join a growing list of law enforcement that appears all too willing to assist Trump in his crackdown on Americans’ rights. Judge Kenneth Easterling, who presided over a hearing last week for some of those charged over the July 17 protest, joined judges who have sided with law enforcement claiming violence from protesters.
“I don’t need a video to tell me,” that police were justified in using force, Easterling said at the hearing, according to Forward Kentucky. Defense attorneys had proposed showing video from the event that conflicted with the police version of events, but Easterling rebuffed the proposal.
“The officer’s testimony is sufficient. It’s been sufficient year upon year here in this community and every community in this commonwealth of Kentucky,” Easterling said. “So, I don’t need to see it.”
Easterling’s willingness to believe Covington police’s version of events is reflective of efforts nationwide by law enforcement to use alleged acts of violence from protesters as pretext to disperse crowds and initiate arrests, as well as prosecutorial efforts to criminalize aspects of protesting. In Los Angeles in June, it was the LAPD, LA County Sheriff and California Highway Patrol that kicked off a violent afternoon and early evening of chaos.
The three local law enforcement agencies effectively cleared a crowd of thousands from an area surrounding the federal building, where protesters were confronting members of the National Guard and Marines who had been sent by Trump to help enforce the administration’s mass deportation policies.
Police brass claimed protesters started the violence that day. Since then, Los Angeles-area law enforcement has been criticized for defending immigration agents during raids.
Those agents are in direct violation of the constitution, a federal judge ruled two weeks ago, engaging in widespread racial profiling that has violated the fourth amendment rights against improper search and seizure of undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens alike.
But Trump’s agents aren’t just at work in LA. Across California and in every state, immigration enforcement is exploding in scope and aggression. The constitutional violations identified by the judge in California are taking place nationwide, as agents storm workplaces and private homes, tightening their dragnet on immigrants and filling detention facilities to capacity and beyond as new jails, prisons and camps are constructed and proposed each week.
As a result of the explosion in detentions, arrests and raids, protests and daily interventions have grown. Americans are confronting immigration agents on the streets, prompting the administration to respond with threats of arrest against Americans who have demanded identification from Trump’s masked agents as well as warrants that are often required for detention or arrest.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has threatened to prosecute anyone involved in the “doxxing” of ICE agents after protesters in Portland distributed fliers identifying agents. It’s not entirely clear whether it’s illegal to identify ICE agents, who as public employees are subject to certain disclosures under federal law. Still, Noem has threatened to prosecute anyone who identifies ICE agents “to the fullest extent of the law,” singling out the mayor of Nashville, who has pushed back on agents in the city. (The Trump administration and its law enforcement partners have arrested several Democratic elected officials in a handful of states, including a judge in Wisconsin.)
Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress have introduced laws that would make it illegal to identify members of Trump’s masked immigration gangs, just as Democrats in Washington and in state legislatures have pushed to make it illegal for immigration agents to obscure their identities by wearing masks. House Democrats are pushing for more information from Noem about ICE agents’ practice of wearing masks — and whether it’s a result of directives from above.
As Justice Department lawyers withhold their names in court proceedings against immigrants, Attorney General Pam Bondi has threatened citizens involved with an app tracking ICE movements.
In Los Angeles, on the frontlines of the citizen resistance to Trump’s immigration regime, federal prosecutors have begun to criminalize some aspects of protest. Justice Department lawyers are prosecuting Alejandro Orellana with conspiracy to aid a riot for distributing face shields to protesters there after Trump deployed the National Guard to the city. Orellana’s lawyer, Thomas Harvey, says the case is a blatant attack on Americans’ right to protest.
“This appears to be a targeted, political attack on resistance to a military incursion on our communities,” Harvey told The Intercept. “Distributing supplies to protesters is not a crime. It’s a critical role to help keep people safe — especially in the face of some of the most violent police repression I’ve seen since the Ferguson uprising.”
***
‘You have no rights here’
All of this turmoil will only grow. H.R. 1’s budget-busting provisions will allow the Trump administration to continue expanding its mass deportation plan by providing an additional $75 billion to ICE. Noem has also promised more than $600 million in FEMA funding to help states construct their own immigration detention centers.
With more money for a proposed 10,000 new agents, ICE can also continue to expand its immigration dragnet by incentivizing local law enforcement to help with the administration’s operations under ICE’s 287(g) program. Under the program, local law enforcement agencies receive funding to participate in immigration enforcement. Membership in the program has doubled since Trump took office, with nearly 700 agencies now participating.
These agencies give Trump yet another weapon in his war on immigrants. Local police are on the frontlines of this war, embedded in communities and possessing the type of street-level knowledge that is crucial to identifying locations and practices of undocumented immigrants.
But perhaps most importantly, local police pull over millions of Americans each day. It’s these traffic stops where the Trump administration can even further increase its deportation numbers. It’s also three stops that carry a high risk of confrontation.
More than 250 law enforcement agencies in Florida participate in the 287(g) program, including the Florida Highway Patrol. On May 2 in North Palm Beach, near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, officers with the Florida Highway Patrol pulled over Kenny Laynez-Ambrosio and his two friends. Laynez-Ambrosio recorded as officers, with the help of backup from the U.S. Border Patrol, put Laynez-Ambrosio’s two friends into headlocks and took them to the ground.
Laynez-Amberosio protested, telling officers their violence was uncalled for.
As he told officers he was a U.S. citizen, the officers responded that he had “no rights here.” The officers then joked about the arrests and noted that they’ll get a bonus for detaining the two undocumented immigrants who were with Laynez-Ambrosio that day.
Laymez-Ambrosio isn’t the only U.S. citizen to have been improperly detained or had their rights denied. A school superintendent in Vermont was detained and interrogated by immigration agents and told he had no constitutional rights while in custody.
Perhaps the cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and other popular social programs will begin to affect Americans in a way they can no longer ignore. Maybe then, more protests and pressure will make Republicans reconsider their remaking of American life in a way that outrage over Trump’s deportation machine has yet to change.
“We see people who work jobs that are living in tents,” said the SEIU’s Dru Batte at Saturday’s protest in Ohio. “We see kids with parents living out of cars with their parents, still going to school and relying on their school lunches.”
Battes warned that, for many Americans, it’s only a matter of time until the American right’s new vision hits home.
“All of these cuts, it’s not about if it affects you,” Battes said. “It’s when.”
***
 | A guest post by
|