Wearing Handmaid’s Tale bonnets and waving Tesla Cybertruck piñatas, a few thousand New Orleanians gathered at Lafayette Square on Saturday to protest the policies of President Donald Trump and his senior adviser, billionaire CEO Elon Musk.
It was the Big Easy installment of the nationwide Hands Off! protest campaign, one of more than 1,200 rallies across all 50 states. Spokesperson Beth Davis said the turnout — the largest single-day demonstration since Trump’s second inauguration —far exceeded her expectations.
“I’ve been overwhelmed by the response,” Davis said, estimating about 3,000 participated locally. “There’s a need to channel our frustration with the current administration.”
Shreveport, Baton Rouge, Lafayette and Lake Charles also saw demonstrations. In New Orleans, some attendees snapped rainbow fans and pushed strollers carrying red-white-and-blue-costumed Chihuahuas. They toted signs, chanted and applauded speeches by politicians including U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, D-New Orleans, New Orleans City Council member JP Morrell and New Orleans City Council member at-large Helena Moreno.
“Does anything that happened over the last 100 days even make sense?” Moreno asked a crowd that stood shoulder-to-shoulder in a square named for Marquis de Lafayette, who assisted Americans in their fight for independence. “Did you know that half of the state’s budget is made up of federal funding? … We say hands off our federal workers, who are providing great services in our city and across our country.”
She, Carter and Morrell vowed to resist Trump’s agenda, while acknowledging that real power rests with the people — whose testimonies dominated the mic.
“Most of the speakers here are talking from their own experience … about what these cuts and this demolition of our federal government means to them,” said Sue Mosley, who is on the steering committee of grassroots activist group Indivisible NOLA.
Victor Pizarro of 504HealthNet, a lifelong New Orleanian whose work in the service industry helps fund his activism, spoke about the need to bring healthcare access to the hospitality industry. Members of immigrant-rights group Unión Migrate warned that deportations could cripple the local economy, removing essential workers who helped rebuild New Orleans after Katrina and still anchor its tourism industry.
Dr. Patricia Kissinger, a professor of epidemiology at Tulane University, said she’d been “DOGE-d” when she lost her grant, and Katie Schwartzman, director of Tulane University’s First Amendment Law Clinic, warned against attacks on higher education and federal courts.
“This is the president of the United States, instructing private universities that students are to be permanently expelled or arrested for protests?” Schwartzman said. “And the effect of that is exactly what you’d expect: Students are terrified to speak.”
Asked about the protests, the White House said in a statement that “President Trump’s position is clear: he will always protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for eligible beneficiaries. Meanwhile, the Democrats’ stance is giving Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare benefits to illegal aliens, which will bankrupt these programs and crush American seniors.”
Activists have staged nationwide demonstrations against Trump and Musk multiple times since Trump returned to office. But before Saturday the opposition movement had yet to produce a mass mobilization like the Women’s March in 2017, which brought thousands of women to Washington after Trump’s first inauguration, or the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that erupted in multiple cities after George Floyd’s killing by police in Minneapolis in 2020.
Attendees on Saturday spoke messages of unity, mutual aid and neighborly care — values they consider their patriotic duty.
“I hope everyone today moves from the space of ‘Everything is on fire and everything is bad,’ and into the space of, ‘My neighbors are hurt. … and that hurts me,'” Mosley said. “We as a community are the ones that a solution is produced from, because we recognize the humanity in each other, and that that is worth protecting. That’s why we build the government.”
