Bonnie Connery was horrified when she read the news about the death of ICE observer Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis on 7 January. Within minutes, she and her local Missoula Visibility Brigade were messaging each other. By 3.30pm, the group of 20 was standing on the South Reserve Street Pedestrian Bridge, arranging letters cut out of craft paper and glued onto black foam and hanging them across the bridge using bungee cords. Thousands of cars driving by during rush hour passed under their messages: “ICE THUGS KILL CITIZEN” and “DHS LIES.”
The idea was to grab drivers’ attention quickly, which often means using a short, shocking message. When asked why the group chose this location, Connery said: “These cars are driving out of Missoula, which is blue, into the very red areas outside of the city.”
After Good’s killing, other Visibility Brigades across the country were assembling, too. In Paramus, New Jersey, protesters hung signs that read “ICE MURDERS WOMAN IN MN” over state highway Route 4. In Palo Alto, California, in St Paul, Minnesota, and in Louisville, Kentucky, protesters gathered in a matter of hours with their quickly assembled signs on their local overpasses.
Though these protests may seem spontaneous, they are the result of months of grassroots organizing. Unlike large national mobilizations such as the No Kings protests, these local brigades are focused on immediate, hyperlocal and high-visibility actions. Dana H Glazer, a national leader at the Visibility Brigade, said their goal is to disrupt passerbys’ veneer of normalcy. “People only act accordingly when they’re constantly faced with the fact that there’s a huge problem,” Glazer said.
Groups like the Visibility Brigade and 50501, one of the lead organizations of the No Kings protests, are encouraging action beyond the national level to include smaller, repeated actions denouncing Donald Trump’s policies. Since March 2025, more than 250 Visibility Brigades have formed all over the country, across urban, rural, blue and red cities.
Glazer said just because the civil actions are small, it doesn’t mean they’re not effective. “These local protests are easy to sustain on a weekly basis.” Glazer said. “There are thousands of cars driving by that see our messages on overpasses in hundreds of cities across the country.”
More protests, more visibility
When Robert Quinlan heard about the United States’s military strike in Caracas, Venezuela, on the night of 3 January, he announced an overpass protest in Clinton, New Jersey, on his social media channels. By the following morning, the former police chief had gathered 35 people on an ice-covered bridge with signs that said “NO WAR FOR OIL.”
Quinlan said that when the Hunterdon County Brigade formed, many people in the county were drawn to it because there weren’t many resistance groups in the area. The majority of the county’s 26 municipalities voted for the US president in the 2024 presidential election. “We don’t make public announcements ahead of time. We’re very discreet,” he said.
Though they’re working with their neighbors, these Visibility Brigade volunteers hope their messaging reaches a regional, not just a local, audience. “I’ve attended many larger protests in New Jersey, but it seemed like sometimes we were preaching to the choir,” Quinlan said. “We didn’t seem like we were reaching a broad range of people, like we do during rush hour.”
Quinlan estimated that up to 20,000 people view their signs during their two-hour protests on Interstate Route 78. “We get some hostility. But mostly, we get a lot of honks from friendly drivers,” he said.
Many organizers interviewed for this story cited the term “social proof”, a rule of persuasion that says people look to others when deciding what to do, or the 3.5% theory by Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth that meaningful political change requires protest and visibility from at least 3.5% of a population. Chenoweth and other researchers have emphasized the need for a strong and varied civil campaign to counter authoritarian policies.
With Visibility Brigade, Glazer said: “Our purpose is to deliver information and remind people that they’re not alone.”
Rebecca Winter, the executive director of Mass 50501 in Massachusetts, said that local civil campaigns can serve multiple practical functions. “They create community safety nets. They share important resources and create action networks. And the solidarity combats paralysis,” she said.
Winter and 50501 have been creating action toolkits so that any group, no matter how small, can gather and make their voices heard. When a college student-led group in Boston reached out to 50501 Massachusetts for help on organizing a protest, they gave them an action toolkit, an adult liaison and a social media playbook to spread the word. “A lot of people in this country haven’t flexed their mass mobilization and activism muscles in a long time,” Winter said. “So we’re just trying to teach them that they can be leaders, too.”
Many of these local protests are organized and publicized on Mobilize.us, a platform for people to create protests, events and volunteer opportunities. Chelsea Thompson, the general manager for the platform’s parent company, said that there has been an upwelling of event signups since Trump started his second term. “Sixty-four percent of these users are using the platform for the first time, and a much greater share of these events are hosted by volunteers themselves, which is a real indication of distributed, local organizing,” Thompson said.
Spreading joy through creative messaging
While their messaging may be urgent, the overpass protests themselves tend to be energetic and joyful. A few days after the new year began, Candy Powell and her Orlando Visibility Brigade put on their black-and-white jailbird costumes and climbed the stairs to an overpass above the Florida Interstate 4. They blared a dance playlist from their speakers and jumped around in their outfits. The group unfurled their banner, revealing the words “REMEMBER JANUARY 6TH.”
Powell said that the brigade started in April 2025 by adopting a more somber tone, but then quickly realized that the most effective political commentators they saw were comedians and comics. They pivoted to a sillier, less self-serious approach. “Our group is funky,” Powell said. “We have themes and fun costumes. If we make videos of us dancing on the overpass and it looks fun, people might want to join in on the joy.”
Julie Peppito, an artist based in Brooklyn, New York, has the same philosophy of including creativity in local protests. For months, she and co-organizer Kate Fermoile have gathered a few dozen neighbors to hold up signs at a busy intersection every Friday for a half-hour. “We wanted to keep it sustainable and joyful with a lot of music,” she said. “We decided to call them Freedom Fridays.”
They’ve experimented with signs that can reach drivers with just one glance, sometimes without words and only symbols. “We have melting ice cubes, a No Kings symbol, and a hands-off symbol,” she said.
Peppito says that though national protests are important, these neighborhood block protests create a tighter web of community-based resistance. “If there was a protest like this in every corner of America, that would be the largest protest in the country,” she said. “People would see our messaging everywhere, and it would be undeniable.”
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