SOUTHEASTERN N.C. — Thousands of local voices added to the thousands of communities nationwide that took to the streets Saturday to protest the actions and policies of the Trump administration.
READ MORE: Constituents vent to cardboard cutouts of elected leaders who won’t attend town halls
“Hands Off” protests were held around the country in over 50 state capitals and around 1,200 locations. Locally, about 1,000 people — protesters, local leaders, and politicians — gathered in front of the Brunswick County Courthouse in Bolivia for a “Hands Off” rally, while over in downtown Wilmington another welcomed roughly 1,000 protesters near the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge, at the corner of Wooster and Third streets.
Cars zoomed by honking horns as rally-goers held signs: “Hands off our healthcare, hands off our education, hands off our social security,” “Tariff-ied” and “Deport Elon Muskrat.”
Topics at the forefront of each rally consisted of voting rights, tariffs, the environment, women’s reproductive freedom, social security, healthcare and education.
“The outrage over everything that’s going on federally with President Trump has brought so many new people into our folds politically, and we wanted a way to express that outrage in public,” Brunswick County rally organizer and New Hanover County Democratic Party Chair Jill Hopman told Port City Daily. “Quite frankly, how many people turned up on a day of Azalea Festival weekend with so many other conflicting events just to be part of this? It really meant a lot to me and both local parties.”
There were 10 speakers addressing the crowd in Brunswick County — Rep. Deb Butler (D-New Hanover), Brunswick County NAACP President Carl Parker, New Hanover Board of Education member Tim Merrick, and Leland council member Bill McHugh among them.
Butler was the first to address protesters at the Brunswick rally, hitting on the Trump administration’s April 2 “Liberation Day” tariffs.
“Today, we gather not just in protest, but in defiance of an administration that threatens our rights, our freedoms and our very democracy,” she stated. “Donald Trump and his feckless minions fail us over and over and over again — and today, I come to you with the stock market in free fall. Why? Because the stock market likes stability and predictability and we have neither. And Trump’s playing golf.”
Since the tariffs took effect, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a key indicator of the health of the U.S. stock market, has fallen by about 10%. The president participated in a senior’s golf tournament in Florida over the weekend.
Signs at the Brunswick rally matched Butler’s comments — “Tariffs hurt everyone everywhere” and “Trump golfs while stocks crash.”
Another topic on the forefront of the Brunswick rally was the environment, specifically, clean drinking water for residents of Brunswick and New Hanover counties. A 2019 Environmental Working Group study found Brunswick County to have the highest PFAS levels of 44 samples taken throughout the nation.
As well, many low-income residents and African-American communities have been complaining of dirty well water and asking Brunswick County commissioners to hook up the communities to county public utilities.
“We are tired of folks that are having to buy bottled water, just to cook with, to bathe their babies with,” Carl Parker voiced to the crowd. “I asked the county: ‘How many of them are on well water?’ Not one of them raised their hand. So I believe that if we can raise our hand high enough, they’ll see us that need clean drinking water.”
Parker has been an active voice in addressing poor water quality for residents of Brunswick County. As reported by PCD last month, Parker and the NAACP partnered with international human rights organization EarthRights requesting Brunswick County take immediate action on improving water quality for residents.
Many Brunswick County attendees were also concerned about the recent North Carolina Supreme Court election. Democratic state Supreme Court Judge Allison Riggs, who was appointed to the bench in 2023, emerged narrowly ahead of Republican candidate Jefferson Griffin, a state appeals court judge, by 734 votes; it triggered a series of recounts.
Griffin challenged the recounts, claiming that more than 65,000 people voted illegally. His basis focused on voters who didn’t have a driver’s license number or social security number on file in voter registration records. The battle against Riggs is ongoing, some five months after the election.
On April 4, an appeals court ruled in favor of Griffin, stating voters have about 15 days to provide any additional information to the DMV that was lacking from their voter registration record. Voters can use the website “The Griffin List” to check if their vote is on the list and reconcile it ahead of the deadline.
“This would be like if Duke protested the game five months later and the NCAA said, ‘OK, we’re going to put 2 minutes back on clock, and we’re going to make Houston prove that every single point they scored really should have counted,’” Hopman said of the recounts. “And that is genuinely absurd, and that’s what they’re doing with voters in only one race when, you know, this could be said about every election before this for the past decades.”
Around 20 miles east in Wilmington, Indivisible Actions Southeast North Carolina — a chapter of national organization Indivisible, focused on advancing progressive policies — organized another rally in Wilmington. The chapter formed shortly after November’s election and Sam Pierce, leader of the local Indivisible Actions, said he was “shocked” by the amount of participants at Saturday’s rally near the bridge. Folks marched, waving their signs, down Castle Street to the Wooster and Third streets destination.
“What we wanted is for folks to understand that: one, they’re not in this alone, that there are a lot of people who feel the same way and they’re ready to get to work,” Pierce told PCD. “Two, we really wanted folks to have a chance to get up … and say a little bit about what they’re feeling, what they’ve experienced, and you know, to some degree, their vision of how this thing could move forward.”
The Wilmington event did not feature any key speakers, instead allowing protesters to sign-up to address the crowd for an allotted 2 minutes. Pierce said about 100 people spoke. Someone sang a protest song, another offered hugs and a 16-year-old surprised him with an “eloquent” speech.
“It builds the sort of shared experience that we’re going to need for the collective action that will be required,” Pierce said.
In addition, Wilmington rally attendees were able to voice concerns by scanning a QR code to submit issues for Indivisible Action to base events on in the future. Out of hundreds of responses, Pierce said poverty and wealth inequality was the largest submitted with 546 responses. In second place was civil rights with 357.
“Anywhere you look, everybody is feeling this attack,” Pierce said of the current administration. “If your issue was the cost of eggs, you’re under attack. You know the economy is getting crushed.”
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