Protesters gather in Riverhead for ‘No Kings’ rally Saturday

Demonstrators gathered in downtown Riverhead Saturday afternoon for the latest “No Kings” rally, part of a nationwide day of protest against the Trump administration.

The “No Kings 3″ event in Riverhead followed a march from Riverhead High School to Town Hall, where people gathered to express support for OLA of Eastern Long Island’s proposed legislation regarding public safety in the face of ICE activities.

The afternoon rally at State Supreme Court on Griffing Avenue opened with a reading by Suffolk County Poet Laureate Chip Williford and an invocation by the Rev. Bohdan Hedz, pastor of St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic Church in Riverhead, setting a tone that blended protest, prayer and appeals for democratic accountability.

Williford cast protest as a distinctly American act. He read “In This Place (An American Lyric),” written by Amanda Gorman for her 2017 inauguration as American Youth Poet Laureate. “There’s a poem in this place, a poem in America, a poet in every American… Tyrants fear the poet now that we know it.”

Hedz, whose church has served as a hub for humanitarian aid to Ukraine during the war with Russia, since its full-scale attack in February 2022, thanked Americans for supporting his homeland.

“As a Ukrainian, thank you. Thank you to all good people of the United States for standing with us from the first day,” Hedz said.

In his prayer, Hedz said, “You alone are the King of kings, and before you, no ruler stands above another,” and urged those gathered to “build a community rooted in compassion, dignity and the common good.”

Speakers throughout the afternoon focused on immigration enforcement, civil liberties, war and what they described as growing threats to democratic institutions.

Organizer John McAuliff of Riverhead, who served as emcee for much of the program, told the crowd near the close of the event that “this is number three. There will be a number four.”

“Between now and the midterms is a moment of great risk for our country,” McAuliff said. “The issue of preserving our democracy and freedom is one that should affect everybody, left, right, center.”

The protest drew clergy, students, advocates and activists from across the East End, with speakers linking national issues to local concerns, especially immigration enforcement on Long Island.

Faith Welch, a Greenport High School senior, spoke about the effect of immigration raids and detentions on young people.

“My generation is watching. We are paying attention,” Welch said. “We are going through every day with the constant fear of if ICE is in town this week, and hoping that our friends, our family and our co-workers are okay.”

She added: “If we are the future this country keeps talking about, then make it a future that we’re anticipating to inherit, not one we’re fearful to obtain.”

Irma Solis, director of the Suffolk Regional Office of the New York Civil Liberties Union, told the crowd the administration’s “main tool” is fear.

“They want immigrants to be afraid of being ripped from their families,” Solis said. “They want trans people to be afraid to exist as their truth does. They want all of us to be afraid to protest and afraid that there is nothing we can do to stop them.” But, she said, public pressure is making a difference.

“We the people are the way out of this,” Solis said. “We must keep up the pressure.”

Solis said the NYCLU is fighting for the passage of the New York for All Act by the State Legislature this year. The law would “protect immigrant families by prohibiting valuable state and local resources from being funneled to carry out an inhumane deportation agenda centered on separating families and creating chaos in communities,” Solis said.

“As immigrant New Yorkers face heightened threats, the time for patchwork protection is over. We need one, universal protection for our entire state,” Solis said.

“We must put an end to collusion at its core by prohibiting state and local government agencies from doing the Trump administration’s dirty work,” she said. “The New York for All Act will help make our communities safer. When local agencies and law enforcement conspire with ICE New Yorkers lose trust in our government…Abduction of our neighbors can drive survivors of violence and people in emergencies away from calling for help or even trusting their neighbors. This makes everyone less safe,” she said. “In fact, data shows that crime is lower in places where officials do not divert time and resources to a hostile immigration agenda. Now is not the time for piecemeal solutions. New York for All is a solution that is necessary to ensure the safety and security of all New Yorkers.”

Alma Tovar of OLA of Eastern Long Island urged support for the group’s proposed local public safety and accountability law, saying the measure is intended to increase transparency when local police interact with federal immigration agents.

“This law does not stop federal immigration enforcement,” Tovar said. “What this law says is very simple: we respect the federal authority, but we also have our responsibility to protect our community.”

She said the proposal is meant to “increase transparency, promote accountability, protect public safety, reduce fear and disruption in our neighborhood.”

Ollie Earl, a Riverhead High School senior who helped organize a student walkout earlier this year, drew some of the loudest applause of the afternoon with a fiery speech denouncing Trump and ICE.

“We still hold this to be self-evident,” Earl said. “But President Donald Trump is too corrupt to value our most sacred republic.”

He accused ICE of acting as Trump’s “personal police force” and said, “We cannot remain silent as this force continues to patrol this island and this country.”

Earl also criticized Rep. Nick LaLota (R-Amityville) who represents the New York’s First Congressional District, which takes in most of Suffolk County, including the East End towns, for his support of Trump’s policies. He scoffed at LaLota’s comments about the No Kings protests. LaLota issued a statement to the media questioning why protesters didn’t turn out to object when President Biden and President Obama took actions LaLota said were without congressional authorization or constitutional authority. criticized. Earl called LaLota’s comments “stupid.”

LaLota, in a statement provided by a press aide last week, said, “Peaceful protest is a fundamental American right, but concern about executive overreach cannot be selective. Where were the ‘No Kings’ rallies when Presidents Obama and Biden authorized military strikes without Congress, or when President Biden attempted to use taxpayer dollars to cancel student loan debt without constitutional authority? And where were the ‘No Queens’ rallies when Kamala Harris became the nominee without going through a primary? Accountability should apply equally, no matter who holds power.”

Earl called for voters to “vote Nick out,” leading the crowd in a brief chant to that effect.

That drew a mild rebuke from McAuliff, who announced that “the partisanship” of Earl’s remarks is not the position of the “No Kings” coalition. “No kings does not take a position on candidates. It believes that everybody should be involved in the electoral process. And obviously the election in November is crucially important to what we believe in. But we do not as a coalition…take any partisan positions,” McAuliff said, noting that many of the organizations in the coalition are 501 (c)(3) not-for-profits.”

The Rev. Roger Joslin of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Greenport and the Church of the Redeemer in Mattituck cast the day’s message in moral terms, invoking scripture in a forceful critique of authoritarian power.

God told the prophet Samuel to warn the Israelis, who wanted a king, about “what kings do,” Joslin said. “Kings concentrate power. Kings demand loyalty above all else. Kings take from the many to enrich the few.”

Kings take and take and take, Joslin said. “He will take your sons. He will take your daughters. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards. He will take a 10th of your flock, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day, you will cry out because of your king, but the Lord will not answer you,” God told Samuel, Joslin said.

“We know what kings do. We are watching it happen. We are watching it happen right here on the East End of Long Island right now,” Joslin said. “The people ICE has been taking from this community, from the farms and kitchens and fishing boats of the North Fork and South Fork are not criminals. They are our neighbors,” he said. “They pick our crops that feed us. They build the houses we live in, they worship in our churches. Their children go to school with our children,” Joslin said. “This is what kings do. They take the vulnerable… They take them quietly from parking lots, from church steps, from school pickup lines, and they count on the rest of us to be too frightened or too comfortable to notice.”

Andrew Leven, a former federal prosecutor and former Republican who said he is now an independent, framed his remarks around the rule of law, arguing that it is under strain. He cited several examples of the erosion of the rule of law during the second Trump administrated. An example, Leven said, is Trump’s use of the president’s pardon power.

Leven spoke about the blanket pardon of the Jan. 6, 2021 rioters who attempted to prevent the certification by Congress of the 2020 election, which Trump lost. Trump falsely claimed, and continues to claim, the 2020 election results were fraudulent, alleging — in spite of strong evidence to the contrary and the failure of multiple federal lawsuits brought by Trump and his supporters seeking to set aside the 2020 results — that the election was stolen from him.

“One of my clients was involved in January 6. I can’t divulge his name or the details of his case,” Leven said. “What I can say is that I saw many hours of videotape from the Capitol that day. It was not a tourist group,” he said, refuting the characterization used by some members of Congress of the mob that stormed the Capitol that day. It was what we all saw on television, and worse. It was a mob desecrating our house,” he said.

“Less widely known is who some of these people are, or more particularly, some of what they did. One pardoned rioter wore body armor, had a pistol loaded with hollow point ammunition and assaulted police officers with a wooden pallet. Another brought homemade incendiary devices. A third stomped on police officers’ heads, swung poles at them, struck an officer with a metal crutch and attacked them with pepper spray and pieces of furniture. A fourth, who had a rifle, two handguns, a stun gun and hundreds of rounds of armor-piercing ammunition, said that he wanted to kill Nancy Pelosi and the mayor of Washington D.C. All of them were pardoned,” Leven said. “Why? Because we are told they were political prisoners.”

Leven spoke, too, about how Trump has involved himself in Justice Department investigations and prosecutions, publicly calling for the attorney general to investigate and prosecute various individuals perceived by the president as his enemies.

“We can also look forward to the likely outcome of Trump’s demand for $230 million to him personally — from us, the taxpayers— to compensate him for the alleged ‘witch hunt’ regarding his involvement in the 2020 riot, his misuse of classified documents and his various frauds. “Will he get this money from us? It’s up to the Department of Justice, and the president controls the Department of Justice, which, incidentally, would explain why by all appearances, there’s been no federal criminal investigation of the deaths of American citizens by ICE agents,” Leven said.

“The implications of these and other data points generally and for the midterms in particular, are stark. We are, in my opinion, not just in a situation where some people are above the law,” Leven said. “We are in a situation where the very existence of the law in this country is in play.”

The rally also included music from Paul Henry, who led the crowd in “This Land Is Your Land.”

In the closing prayer, Father John Cervini of St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church in Riverhead urged mercy and national repentance, saying, “Our hearts are screaming in prayer today. Lord, have mercy on us. Christ, have mercy on us.”

Prior to the rally outside the Supreme Court building on Griffing Avenue, protesters gathered outside Riverhead Town Hall on West Second Street to call on the Riverhead Town Board to adopt the local law proposed by OLA of Eastern Long Island that aims to ensure transparency and accountability in federal law enforcement activities. Riverhead officials so far have declined to meet with OLA to discuss the bill, drafted by retired State Assembly Member Fred Thiele.

The crowd then marched down Roanoke Avenue to Main Street and up Griffing Avenue to the courthouse rally.

Saturday’s rally in Riverhead was one of thousands held nationwide as part of the third “No Kings” protest day. The protests took place in all 15 states and 16 countries, according to organizers, who said the demonstrations drew more than the estimated 7 million people that attended the last No Kings day in October.

Blustery winds made the temperature feel like 10 degrees lower than the 39 degrees on the thermometer, according to the National Weather Service. The shade of the Supreme Court building made it feel event colder and as the building’s shadow grew longer, the crowd moved to the other side of the street in search of the warmth of sunshine. The rally got underway at 1:30 p.m. and after an hour, the crowd thinned considerably. The event did not wrap up until about 3:30, and by the time Father Cervini gave the benediction at the end of the event, only a handful of people remained.

At the 3 p.m. dispersal time, with Leven speaking to the remaining dozen or so people, police opened up Griffing Avenue to traffic. Almost immediately, a white convertible with the top down, flying a large flag that read “TRUMP 2020 – No More Bullshit,” drove down Griffing Avenue. Moments later, the same car returned, this time northbound. The vehicle drew no discernible reaction from the speaker or spectators.

RiverheadLOCAL photos by Denise Civiletti