Law enforcement officers have evacuated the Hawaii state capitol due to a possible bomb threat hours before a No Kings event was scheduled to occur at the building.

Local media reported that the evacuation occurred just before 10am local time, and that protest participants were relocated to the ʻIolani Palace grounds.

From Chicago, my colleague Amy Qin reports:

It’s 4pm and the crowd is starting to thin out but hundreds are still marching through the streets of downtown Chicago as the afternoon light begins to cast dramatic shadows from the adjacent skyscrapers.

In a sea of homemade signs, some protesters are also waving dozens of flags representing Palestine, Ireland, Mexico and Lebanon. “Hands off Gaza now” and “End the war and deportation” chant a group of protesters waving Palestinian flags.

A brass band from LaSalle Street church is posted on the sidewalk playing a jazzed up rendition of This Little Light of Mine against the roar of Chicago’s “El” train system above and people shouting from their apartments several stories up.

I talked to Karime Sepulveda, 25, about what brought her out to protest today.

“I think for me the most personal issue is immigration,” Sepulveda said. “I’m the product of two immigrants who came here to give me a better life.”

For many demonstrators, the influx of ICE and border patrol agents in Chicago last fall during “Operation Midway Blitz” is still fresh in their minds. Federal agents made thousands of arrests, deployed an unprecedented amount of teargas and chemical irritants on protesters, and fatally shot Silverio Villegas Gonzalez and Marimar Martinez.

The wave of No Kings demonstrations is sweeping westward as protesters hit the streets in Texas, Colorado, California and Oregon.

Here’s a selection of images from the marches occuring across the western United States:

As one of Washington DC’s No Kings marches wound down at the Southwest Waterfront, protesters said they want the country to remember that DC was the “guinea pig”.

“Donald Tump unleashed this on Washington DC first,” Ama’d, 27, said as a group of national guard members stood a few feet away. “We need the rest of the country to know that we are being over-policed in our communities.”

Ama’d, an activist and music artist, helped design protest music that he performed on a float. “No one man should have all that power! We need our rights back! We’re taking back ours,” one musician rapped as crowds of protesters chanted, “Free DC! Free DC!”

As protesters made their way to the Waterfront metro station, organizers distributed flyers for future protests, including a daily “Hands Off the Arts” protest to “keep the Kennedy Center open” and “save jobs,” organizers told the Guardian.

For a 1 May protest, activists are demanding a day of “No work. No School. No shopping,” another flyer states.

“Part of what we are trying to do is be in solidarity with other groups and movements that are being attacked and one of them is the labor unions and working people here in DC,” said Nachama Wilker, 64, a volunteer with Free DC, the local organization advocating for DC home rule and DC statehood. “The May action is in solidarity with all of these labor organizations as Trump guts union jobs in DC.”

Wilker added, “People come out to these big rallies, and they don’t know how to plug in after the rally. That’s a big reason why I am handing out these flyers.”

Jane Fonda, Joan Baez and Maggie Rogers are closing out the day’s speakers in St Paul.

“This is not the America I was told existed,” Fonda said. “I was told we are the people.”

Rogers praised Minnesotans for their resilience, saying it was inspiring. “So much love in the face of evil,” she said.

Baez praised Minnesota’a resistance, saying “thank you, Minneapolis”.

Then, Baez and Rogers ended the rally by singing The Times They Are A-Changing.

As No Kings protests begin to wrap up on the east coast, they’re just getting started in California.

Here’s a glimpse of the demonstrations under way in San Francisco and Los Angeles:

The multiple No Kings contingents in Manhattan merged through Times Square, continuously flanked by photographers. Families carried LGBTQ+ pride flags and Palestinian flags, while older marchers held pun-heavy protest signs, and others handed out whistles. Across age groups and race – though the crowd did overall lean white and older, it was by no means homogenous – the consistent themes were anti-ICE, pro-LGBTQ+, and, obviously, anti-Trump.

But perhaps the most consistent theme was anti-war. Multiple signs connected the Epstein files to the Trump administration’s decision to target Iran and spend immense amounts of funding on warfare. “This war has to stop,” said MB, 55, who came in from Queens to protest. “American people do not want what this administration is doing. We don’t want it. We need healthcare, we need jobs. We need infrastructure.”

The front of the march reached the dispersal point at Madison Square Garden by 3:30 local time, and more than an hour later, protesters still streamed through the closed intersection. Leftist organizing groups and political parties set up shop to peel protesters off as they walked to the subway, flyering for future actions and ways to get involved in their work.

Organizers in Minnesota estimate at least 200,000 are at the main march at the state capitol in St. Paul.

The crowd stretches back further than I can see in multiple directions.

“Fuck ICE” and “ICE OUT” signs and pins are a frequent site, an indicator of how much the federal government’s incursion into the state left a mark on its people.

Speakers on the stage talked about how they and their organizations responded on the ground to their neighbors’ needs during the surge.

Bernie Sanders riled up the crowd with remarks about the role of the ultra rich in politics.

My colleage Amy Qin is continuing to report live from Chicago, where a diverse slate of speakers, including faith leaders and legal advocates, have addressed a crowd gathered at Butler Field in Grant Park:

The loudest cheers came when two student protest leaders came on stage, including Leah Sophia Lopez, a student at Social Justice High School in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, a predominately Latino neighborhood that was a frequent target of Trump’s immigration enforcement campaign last fall.

“My fellow Americans: kids are being put into cages while our government funds war and genocides,” said Lopez, who led hundreds of students in a school walk out protesting ICE last year. “America is built off of protest, immigrants, slaves, we built this county.”

Illinois lieutenant governor Juliana Stratton closed out the rally to thunderous cheers from the crowd. “We came here to make it clear that we will never bow to a king,” she said. “Illinois will stand up and fight back like we always do.”

Thousands of protesters are rallying across the Washington, DC region as No Kings protests spread across the nation’s capital.

One protest group, made up of about a dozen Palestinian mothers, stood at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and waved a massive 10-foot-tall Palestinian flag. One of the mothers, activist Hazami Barmada, 42, said she was protesting to draw attention to “Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinian people.”

“Most Americans don’t know that our tax dollars are being used to subsidize violence,” Barmada said. “This is happening while many Americans can’t afford housing, milk, school, or healthcare. Prices continue to go up as we are fighting Israel’s wars.”

Other protesters, led by local activist organizations including Free DC, gathered at the Frederick Douglass Bridge in southeast Washington, DC. The crowd marched across the bridge to Fort McNair in Southwest DC where White House senior advisor Stephen Miller resides. The protest’s organizers say Miller is “running the effort to take over DC.”

Protesters told the Guardian they wanted to draw attention to the occupation of Washington, DC. In August, President Trump issued an executive order that put the federal government in charge of the Washington, DC Metropolitan Police Department. Trump used an additional executive order to deployed more than 2,000 members of the National Guard to the nation’s capital. Trump said the Guard members were mobilized to fight crime, though violent crime in DC is at a 30-year low.

Thousands of protesters are rallying at Butler Field in Grant Park, Chicago, where my colleage Amy Qin is reporting:

As they filed into the park, protesters chanted “ICE out” and “Trump must go now, facists gotta go now”.

Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson was the first to speak at the event, opening by addressing the size of the crowd: “Look around: Our movement is bigger, our resolve is bigger.”

“We’re sending a clear message: we’re gonna end these assaults against working people, against immigrants and end these endless wars,” Johnson said.

In the crowd, protesters held aloft signs reading “No country for orange men” and “Imagine hating immigrants more than pedophiles”. Others waved signs denouncing ICE, supporting voting rights and criticizing wars.

Later in the rally, Dian Palmer, president of SEIU Local 73, said, “Fascism is really just one thing: powerful people using force to keep everyone else down, and unions exist to push back against that.”

Also at the event, social worker and Chicago Therapy Collective executive director Iggy Ladden denounced the Trump administration’s attacks against transgender people.

“Trans people are a direct threat to fascism because depends on control telling people who they can and cannot be,” Ladden said. “When we build a world that protects trans people we build a world that’s better for everyone.”

As demonstrators gather across the United States, the White House and Republican leadership are denouncing the No Kings day events planned today as “Trump Derangement Therapy Sessions”.

In a statement, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said the demonstrations were created by “leftist funding networks” and that “only people who care about these Trump Derangement Therapy Sessions are the reporters who are paid to cover them.”

The National Republican Congressional Committee echoed the White House. “These Hate America Rallies are where the far-left’s most violent, deranged fantasies get a microphone,” spokesperson Maureen O’Toole told the Associated Press.

Protesters are gathering in Minnesota’s Twin Cities for a flagship No Kings rally in St Paul. Bruce Springsteen is expected to headline the event and perform Streets of Minneapolis, which he wrote following the deaths of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti earlier this year.

Joan Baez, Jane Fonda and senator Bernie Sanders are also expected at the St Paul rally, which organizers believe could attract about 100,000 people.

Well before the main New York City No Kings march was set to touch off near Central Park’s south-west edge, protesters milled through the frigid midtown streets with posters and banners, donning costumes, keffiyehs and parkas.

By 1.50pm, Letitia James, the state attorney general, Jumaane Williams, the city public advocate, Robert De Niro, Rev Al Sharpton and Padma Lakshmi filed into the front of the crowd behind hand painted banners reading: “WE PROTECT OUR DEMOCRACY – PEOPLE OVER BILLIONAIRES – WE PROTECT OUR NEIGHBORS.” They joined union members in AFT merch and protesters of all ages.

Press photographers swarming the celebrities slowed the progress of the march down 7th Avenue, making it difficult for them to take off. “From Palestine to Mexico, all the walls have got to go,” someone boomed into a small speaker, half a block ahead of the celebrities. “Racist ICE, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” Hundreds more people awaited the march in Times Square, while another march proceeded parallel down Broadway to convene.

As crowds continue to gather in Washington DC and Minnesota’s Twin Cities – where two of the largest protests of the day are planned – demonstrations are underway across the country.

Here are some more images from protests in Georgia, Kansas, Texas and elsewhere.

Hundreds of demonstrators have gathered outside the Capitolio de Puerto Rico in San Juan where my colleage Joseph Gedeon is reporting.

Here’s a scene of the crowds:

In an op-ed published today, California congressman Ro Khanna said, “The Epstein class thinks it runs America. Today, No Kings protesters send their response.”

“As more Americans are sent to fight abroad and the survivors of abuse are silenced at home, people increasingly feel dispensable,” the California congressman wrote in MS NOW. Khanna co-sponsored the Epstein Files Transparency Act. “For too long, Americans have seen our leaders fight harder for the Epstein class than for the working class. They have watched our system shield elites instead of delivering fundamentals such as affordable health care, housing and education.”

In the year since Donald Trump retook office, the number of protests in the US outpaced those at the same point in his first administration, according to data from the Crowd Counting Consortium, an open-source project collaboration between Harvard University’s Kennedy School and the University of Connecticut, reported Lex McMenamin and Andrew Witherspoon.

There were more than 10,700 protests in 2025, a 133% increase from the 4,588 recorded in 2017, the first year of Trump’s first term. According to the data, an overwhelming majority of US counties – including 42% that voted for Trump – have had at least one protest since he was re-inaugurated last year.

“It is a very historic time, in the sense that people are mobilizing where they live in ways that I don’t think I have seen before in my lifetime,” said Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard Kennedy School and co-director of the Crowd Counting Consortium.

Demonstrators are gathering at “No Kings” protests across the country – from the National Mall in Washington to the Twin Cities in Minnesota, where massive anti-ICE protests took place earlier this year after federal agents killed two residents.

More than 3,000 events are expected to occur in cities and small towns across the country today. Here are some images from the protests occuring in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee:

At the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, about a thousand people gathered to protest the Trump administration’s cuts to scientific research and wide-ranging policies that have damaged health at home and abroad.

“If we don’t speak up, RFK Jr and Jay Bhattacharya will own the airwaves,” said Nina Friedman, a doctoral candidate at University of Maryland whose research has been supported by NIH.

“What I see is one person trying to run science like a king,” said Michael Green, an early career researcher whose work on trust in doctors among Black patients was terminated in the sweeping cuts enacted over the past year. “I study trust for a living,” Green said. “Trust is not gained by going on a podcast,” he added, a reference to the frequent right-wing podcast appearances by Jay Bhattacharya, the head of NIH.

The June 2025 No Kings protests were estimated to be among the biggest ever single-day protests in US history.

Working out exactly where the protest ranks compared with similar recent events has been a project of G Elliott Morris, a data journalist who runs the Substack Strength in Numbers, calculated turnout between 4 million and 6 million, which would be 1.2% – 1.8% of the US population. This could exceed the previous record in recent history, when between 3.3 million and 5.6 million people showed up at the 2017 Women’s March to rally against Trump’s misogynistic rhetoric.

Morris estimated the No Kings Day protest turnout in two steps. First, his team gathered data at events for as many locations as possible, defaulting to tallies published in local newspapers. Where that wasn’t available, they relied on estimates from organizers and attenders themselves.

To come up with a rough approximation of nationwide numbers, he then estimated the attendance in each unreported protest would be equal to the median of the attendance in places where data did exist. “That’s a tough approximation, but at least an empirical one,” Morris wrote in an email. “We use the median instead of the average to control for outliers, [such as the fact that] big cities pull the average up, but most events are not huge urban protests.”

Morris stressed that the Strength in Numbers tally remains unofficial, and he hopes that researchers will “build” on his data when they conduct more studies. But his estimation is similar to that made by Ezra Levin, the co-founder of Indivisible, the progressive non-profit that organized the event. He estimated that 5 million people across the globe took to the streets.

Meanwhile, crowds have begun to gather in Washington DC:

Good morning. Today our US politics blog will cover the third No Kings march as millions of people are expected to protest against the Trump administration at more than 3,000 events across the US.

A flagship event will be held in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, where massive anti-ICE demonstrations broke out earlier this year after federal agents killed two residents.

Our reporters will share updates from that and other events across the country, at what event organizers hope will be “the biggest protest in American history”.