As tanks and soldiers paraded through the streets of Washington on Saturday, several million people around the country turned out to protest against the excesses of Donald Trump’s administration.

The protests, dubbed “No Kings”, took place at about 2,100 sites nationwide, from big cities to small towns. A coalition of more than 100 groups joined together to plan the protests, which are committed to a principle of nonviolence.

This week, Trump has deployed national guard and US marine troops to Los Angeles to crack down on protesters who have demonstrated against his ramped-up deportations, defying state and local authorities in a show of military force that hasn’t been seen in the US since the civil rights era. Interest in the Saturday protests rose as a result, organizers said, including at a site near Trump’s south Florida Mar-a-Lago estate.

No Kings organizers estimated the day’s events drew millions of people, with some hundreds still under way in all 50 states and to some cities abroad. These included over 200,000 in New York and over 100,000 in Philadelphia, plus some small towns with sizable crowds for their populations, including the town of Pentwater, Michigan, which saw 400 people join the protest in their 800-person town, the No Kings coalition said. 

The protests were largely peaceful, though some – in Los Angeles and Portland – were later deemed unlawful assembly by law enforcement and met with teargas.

The tenor of the day was also marked by political violence. There were two early morning shootings of two Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota, one of whom was killed along with her husband, in what local officials called a politically motivated attack. The state’s police and governor cautioned people to not attend demonstrations across the state “out of an abundance of caution”.

Many thousands of people still turned up at the main protest in Minnesota, at the state capitol, to make it clear that political violence wouldn’t silence them. Crowds stretched for blocks as people carried signs against Trump, and some that mentioned the names of the lawmakers who were shot. On the main stage, organizers mentioned the tragedy, saying how it strengthened their resolve and underscored the importance of gathering together.

Perry McGowan carried a sign with the names of the two lawmakers – Melissa Hortman and John Hoffman – and a red heart.

“We are all affected by not just by political violence, but all violence in our lives,” he said. “And there’s way too much of it – way too much gun violence, way too much television hate, way too much inhumanity to your neighbors, and we need to push back on that and to contribute civility to our common good.” 

In Texas, officials said they had “identified a credible threat toward state lawmakers planning to attend” a No Kings demonstration at the state capitol, the Associated Press reported.

Related: Hundreds of US marines arrive in LA as large protests are planned across US

In Philadelphia, meanwhile, thousands marched from Love Park in the early afternoon, holding umbrellas and signs.

Victor, a 56-year-old chef originally from Argentina, held a hand-painted sign that depicted Donald Trump as a pig, with “Oink” painted atop his image in large letters. “Other people have the right to work hard and make a life for themselves when they come from a country where they can’t do that or are facing political oppression or are desperate,” he said. “This is supposed to be the land of opportunity and a land built on immigrants.”

He was disappointed by the military parade happening 123 miles (200km) away in Washington DC. “It’s a perverse show of power unnecessarily,” he said. 

In some Republican-led states, governors had pre-emptively signaled that law enforcement would quell any protests that they deemed violent.

Texas governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, deployed his state’s national guard to manage protests ahead of No Kings and amid ongoing demonstrations against Trump’s immigration agenda. In Florida, Republican governor Ron DeSantis said that people could legally run over protesters with their cars if they were surrounded. “You don’t have to sit there and just be a sitting duck and let the mob grab you out of your car and drag you through the streets. You have a right to defend yourself in Florida,” he said.

Although most protests went without incident, some saw threats and safety issues.

The No Kings protests at Georgia’s capitol unfolded without police confronting demonstrators, but police dispersed a protest with smoke and teargas in a suburban neighborhood that is home to a high concentration of Hispanic residents.

And in San Francisco, NBC News reported that a driver hit at least four demonstrators who reportedly suffered “non life-threatening injuries”, while in Virginia a man drove an SUV through a crowd and injured one protester. 

Early in the day demonstrations gathered strength outside LA city hall, awash with American flags. After a week of Trump administration officials and their allies seizing on the Mexican flags waved by LA street protesters and saying they were symptoms of a foreign invasion, many brought US flags from home, either waving them or wrapping them around their shoulders. Others took them from volunteers handing them out at sites across the rally.

Later in the day in Los Angeles, a crowd formed outside a federal building and started chanting, “Leave LA!” at the national guard members stationed outside and some reportedly threw objects at the building.

At 4pm the LAPD also declared ‘unlawful assembly’ for protesters who were outside the approved protest area, issued a dispersal order and began firing teargas and foam rubber bullets shortly after. Most of the crowd dispersed quickly. Unlike the morning protests, there were more masked protesters in the evening.

In Portland, Oregon, federal agents reportedly also used teargas against demonstrators outside of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facility after they said the protestors attempted to breach the door.

The coalition did not hold a protest in Washington DC – an intentional choice to draw contrast with the military parade and to not give the president an excuse to crack down on peaceful protest. But a DC-based organization hosted a “DC Joy Day” in the district that will “celebrate DC’s people, culture, and our connections to one another”.

A separate group of about 300, organized by Refuse Fascism, marched to the White House to protest. Army veteran Chris Yeazel was among the protesters and said he came out in reaction to Trump’s deployment of troops to Los Angeles, and his speech to army soldiers at Fort Bragg, which has been criticized for its partisan tone.

“This is the nation’s capital,” Yeazel said. “This is exactly where we need to protest.”

Trump initially said people who protested the parade would be met with “very big force”, though the White House then attempted to clarify he was fine with peaceful protest. Asked about the No Kings protests during a White House event on Thursday, Trump said: “I don’t feel like a king. I have to go through hell to get things approved.”

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Since the start of his second term, opposition to Trump has grown, manifesting in protests and demonstrations including against Elon Musk at his car company, against deportations, around his retribution agenda and government cuts.

Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium, which tracks political crowds, found that there had been three times as many protests by the end of March 2025 compared to 2017, during Trump’s first term, and that was before major protests in April and May. The biggest day of protest so far came on April 5, with “Hands Off”, which the consortium estimated drew as many as 1.5 million people, a lower figure than organizers cited.

“Overall, 2017’s numbers pale in comparison to the scale and scope of mobilization in 2025 – a fact often unnoticed in the public discourse about the response to Trump’s actions,” a new analysis from the consortium said.