The Beverly Hills community answered the call for nationwide protests against the Trump administration when more than 3,000 people gathered in Roxbury Park on Oct. 18 as part of nationwide “No Kings” rallies.
The crowd stretched the length of the park from Roxbury Drive to Spalding Drive along Olympic Boulevard. Attendees from across the greater Los Angeles area came out to demonstrate against President Donald Trump for acting, as they believe, as an authoritarian monarch. Protesters held signs that read “The power of the people is greater than the people in power,” “I love democracy” and “No king but Billie Jean King.” Chants of “Show me what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like” and “Hey, hey. Ho, ho, Donald Trump has got to go” rang out from the crowd. Drummers and other musicians played along to the call and response.
The protest was part of a nationwide movement that saw crowds turn out for around 2,600 rallies over the weekend, including 30 held in L.A. County. The rally was the third mass protest organized in Beverly Hills against the Trump administration since the president retook office, said Gay Abrams, one of the event’s organizers.
“We had over 3,000 people who were so happy to be there,” Abrams said. “They came to voice their concerns about what’s happening in this country, and to stand up to what we see is an authoritarian regime and an attack on our Constitution, on our rights, an attack on our decency and our democracy, an attack on immigrants. … Everyone in this country at some point is related to an immigrant, and I think a lot of the people who were there are just very disheartened by what we see with the ICE attacks and the threatening and people being arrested and pulled from the street by masked men without due process. It’s so indecent. It’s so un-American.”
Beverly Hills Vice Mayor Craig Corman and Councilmember Mary Wells attended the rally.
“I was happy to come out and support so many of our residents as they exercised their constitutional right to peacefully protest. I believe last Saturday’s demonstrations across the country and around the globe drew critical attention to recent actions by the current administration that all of us should find deeply concerning,” Corman told the Courier.
Around 20 counter protesters, including local students, were present at different points throughout the protest. However, Abrams said that the organizers and officers from the Beverly Hills Police Department deescalated any conflicts that arose.
The protests come in the wake of mass Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids carried out by the Trump administration in L.A. County, the deployment of federal troops in major cities across the U.S., federal funding cuts, government layoffs, the rollback of vaccine requirements, health care cuts, and a plethora of other federal policies.
“If there were one thing that we objected to, that would be a luxury that we don’t have,” said Andrea Grossman, a longtime Beverly Hills resident and co-organizer of the rally. “There are thousands of things—whether it’s the decimation of our public institutions, the decimation of our health regulators. There are a thousand different crises.”
However, Grossman also said it gave her hope to see such a large presence and outpouring of support at the protest.
“It was a really diverse crowd coming together,” she added. “You had people from all sorts of ethnic groups, all sorts of ages. … People showed up to say, ‘This is not the America that I want to see for my future.’”
Abrams said that the administration’s policies echo dark chapters of history.
“The playbook is an old playbook of dictatorship, and it’s frightening,” she said. “For residents in Beverly Hills who share the same values as I do, I think that this rally was very important to them that they feel supported in their concerns, their fear and their anger.”
The “No Kings” protest ultimately gave her the hope that the movement in Beverly Hills is growing, Abrams said, adding that the first rally she organized in April was attended by about 120 people.
“We are building momentum, and we’re not going to stop,” she said. “We’re going to peacefully and nonviolently continue to resist this authoritarian regime, authoritarian administration, and we’re going to continue to do it in Beverly Hills.”
