Anti-Trump Activists Clash with Police during Protest March
TEHRAN (Tasnim) - The NYPD pepper-sprayed and arrested unruly protestors among 700 activists who marched on Fifth Avenue and dangled from Central Park statues during an anti-Trump march Saturday.
Cops shut down several blocks of Fifth Avenue as activists marched from Columbus Circle to Trump Tower Saturday.
Protesters were pepper-sprayed when they tried to breach police barricades keeping them to the sidewalks at Sixth Avenue and 59th Street. Several got into shoving matches with officers. Others broke into anti-cop chants. At least three were arrested for disorderly conduct, New York Post reported.
The demonstrators –opposed by about a dozen Trump supporters — had massed at the foot of the Trump International Hotel in Columbus Circle at noon. They were kept in check there by a huge NYPD presence.
The crowd chanted slogans like “Only difference is the name! Hitler, Trump is the same!” for an hour as its numbers swelled.
Activists carried homemade signs that hammered Trump’s stance on border control (“Build a Wall Around Trump and Make Him Pay For It”), women (“Women to Trump: It’s Mutual”), and the size of his body parts (“Put America in Bigger Hands”).
A banner read “No Human Being Is Illegal” in Spanish, English, and Arabic. Another used a Spanish vulgarity to insult the GOP frontrunner.
“We’re disgusted with his rhetoric,” said protester Giovanni Garcia, 48, who emigrated from Mexico as a child. “I don’t want him to get any farther.”
“We’re fighting for the soul of our country,” said Peter Blewett, 20. Organizers, led by Cosmopolitan Antifascists and joined by Millions March NYC, the Black Lives Matter group NYC Shut It Down, and others, lost control as the crowd began to move along 59th Street toward Trump’s namesake skyscraper.
With Fifth Avenue blocked, the protesters circled the area around Trump Tower and marched back uptown. Many climbed up the Maine memorial at the southwest corner of Central Park to pump up the crowd.
