Crowds in Fort Worth and Arlington will join over 2,500 rallies across the country for a No Kings protest Oct. 18, protesting the perceived authoritarianism of the Trump Administration.
Fort Worth’s crowd will gather in Burk Burnett Park, and Arlington’s will meet outside the Arlington Sub Courthouse. Both events will take place from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
In June, police estimated about 2,000 people attended the protest in Fort Worth, and over 1,000 people attended Arlington’s. Both stayed peaceful. Organizers are coordinating with the police department to avoid potential violence, said Sabrina Ball, an organizer for the event.
Several progressive activist groups are organizing the Fort Worth protest, including Indivisible TX-12, which Ball, a house district coordinator for the Tarrant County Democratic Party, helped form in January after President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Indivisible is a nationwide network of progressive activist groups that started following Trump’s 2016 election to mobilize action against the administration and the Republican Party. The organization is a primary planner of the No Kings protests.
June’s No Kings Day was the largest single-day protest mobilization since Trump’s inauguration, according to Harvard University’s Crowd Counting Consortium, and Ball expects Saturday’s to be larger.
“Tarrant County is the seat of Christian nationalism in Texas,” Ball said. It is the biggest swing county. We flip Tarrant, we flip Texas.”
Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker, a Republican, told the Report on Thursday that it’s everyone’s right to protest anywhere.
“I'm always so proud of Fort Worth PD, they do such a great job preparing, making sure everybody feels safe and welcome,” Parker said. “I think you're going to see a smooth event on Saturday.”
Ball said police were “already monitoring chatter.” In June, they were on rooftops, in parking garages and wearing plain clothes in the crowd.
Gov. Greg Abbott said in a Thursday press release he’ll deploy Texas National Guard troops to the No Kings protest in Austin because of a “planned antifa-linked demonstration.” Abbott’s statement didn’t specify the connection between the planned protests and antifa, nor comment on whether other Texas cities could see National Guard presence.
Drew Shaw is a government accountability reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at drew.shaw@fortworthreport.org or @shawlings601.
At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
This article first appeared on Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
