On Saturday, April 5, thousands of people gathered in Spokane in BA Clark Park for a Hands Off! Rally, part of a nationwide mass mobilization effort to protest the ongoing actions of President Donald Trump and the federal government. Simultaneous rallies happened in cities across the state, the nation and even overseas.
The global Hands Off! Rally was planned by a large coalition of groups, including the ACLU, 50501 and Indivisible. Locally, the regional chapter of Indivisible was joined in organizing by the Spokane Regional Labor Council, the Spokane League of Women Voters and others.
RANGE intern Sandra Rivera documented the Spokane rally for two hours, snapping photos and chatting with the people who spent their afternoon in the park.
Rivera, who arrived at 3 pm, said the protest reached its peak around 4 pm, estimating more than 5,000 people in attendance. There were thousands of people in the park, with more lining the sidewalk near the road and others across the street.
The ✨vibes✨
Depending on where you were in the crowd, Rivera said, the energy was different. Near the street, there was honking. “That was the most energetic part,” Rivera said, but in other parts of the park, people sat in lawn chairs with flags, and in other parts, kids alternated between playing and waving signs.
Even Jesus wandered the crowd, carrying a large wooden cross.
“Jesus is always where the people are,” Jesus told Rivera, declining to offer any other name for himself or any other information about his mission at the protest.
There was music everywhere: people playing tunes from their personal speakers from inside the crowd, neighbors near the event blasting music from porch speakers as they watched the scene and even live music, from community marching band the P-Jammers, or PJAMRS (Peace and Justice Activist Musical Rascals of Spokane).
Some of the songs that formed the soundtrack of the protest included:
- Bob Dylan’s Blowing in the Wind
- The Beatles’ Helter Skelter
- Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come
- Macklemore’s Downtown
In other places of the park, the vibes were different. A small group of counterprotestors — about a dozen when Rivera saw them — held their own pro-Trump gathering.
In that corner, people were arguing about religion, Rivera said. One pro-Trump woman yelled at a woman and her child, shouting that bringing a kid to a protest was “indoctrination.”
“ Those guys, they were there for only 40 minutes before they left,” Rivera said. “People were getting pissed at them. People kept driving by and flipping them off.”
She recognized a few of the pro-Trump folks too, like former Proud Boy Will Hulings, who frequently speaks at Spokane City Council meetings.
There was a much higher police presence in that area, too, with police tape and officers separating the two groups.
At the end of the rally, Rivera said, most of the folks there left in high spirits.
“ The main thing I kept hearing from people were like, ‘it’s so nice to see so many smiling faces.’” Rivera said. “Everyone was happy.”
The causes
A survey of the signs in the crowd revealed a slew of injustices the crowd was there to rally against:
- The massive cuts from the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)
- Trump’s approach to Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine
- The genocide in Gaza
- Cuts to Social Security
- Potential cuts to Medicare and Medicaid
- Tariffs
- Mass deportations
- And so many more issues than we can list in a photo essay.
While Rivera wasn’t unable to chat with any of the union organizers, there was also a strong labor presence at the event, which was co-sponsored by the Spokane Regional Labor Council. Signs held above the crowd called out class warfare and the plight of workers.
Intergenerational action
The protest was attended by people of all generations, Rivera said. She saw college students and their professors, parents and their children and older folks with signs like “This isn’t my first protest.”
One of the moments that stuck out to her was when a little girl, perched on top of her dad’s shoulders and holding a sign, started to chant, “Hi, ho, Trump has gotta go.”
And on the other side of the spectrum, the Raging Grannies, who have a long history of protesting in Spokane, had a booth with petitions for people to sign.
A lot of the older folks Rivera talked to held American flags, sometimes upside down in the symbol for distress. They shared their fears about Trump jeopardizing Social Security, the erosion of veterans’ rights, the stupidity of renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America”.
One sentiment Rivera heard repeated over and over again: “I’m too old for this shit.”
Shooting the intergenerational aspect of the rally produced Rivera’s favorite photo of the afternoon, a picture of a kid hanging on a pole and displaying a sign that read, “When leaders act like kids, the kids become the leaders.”
“ He was holding up the sign, but he was still playing, like he was still acting like a kid and holding the sign,” Rivera said. “He’s surrounded by all these older people and he decided to climb that pole and hold it up … He just has this nice, young energy and he stared at me with the camera, so I thought that was fun.”
You can view Rivera’s full gallery of photos from the event here.
