ALPINE — A protest in Alpine over the weekend against the Trump administration came and went mostly without incident. Around 150 people gathered on the Brewster County Courthouse lawn, holding signs and waving to oncoming traffic.
In the last 10 minutes, a vintage Dodge with a camper shell circled the block a handful of times, bearing a “Trump Train” flag and yelling homophobic slurs at the crowd, according to numerous witnesses. A video posted on social media appears to show their last pass down the road, when a protester stuck their flag into the right lane, striking the windshield of the truck and injuring a man concealed in the gap between the bed and the camper shell.
The Brewster County Sheriff’s Office (BCSO) arrested the man with the flagpole, a part-time tri-county resident, on assault and criminal mischief charges just a few minutes later. The crowd dispersed peacefully, but it left many on the scene with mixed emotions: how could the situation have been handled differently? Was talking about it at all detracting from the message of the event?
Saturday’s demonstration in Alpine was a part of the nationwide “No Kings” protest, which intentionally coincided with President Trump’s birthday and a taxpayer-funded $45 million military parade in D.C. to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States Army. Some counts estimate between four and six million people attended protests around the world, and the event could prove to be the largest single-day protest in American history.
The planned protest followed a week of spontaneous uprising in Los Angeles against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which had been conducting raids around the city. The protests reflect a growing anti-ICE sentiment around the country, ranging on a spectrum from discomfort with immigration raids taking place in courthouses and schools to a call for total abolition of the 22-year-old government agency. (A Reuters poll taken this Monday suggests that more Americans disapprove rather than approve of the Trump administration’s handling of immigration policy, marking a major shift.)
Folks showing up to No Kings protests around the country also woke up Saturday morning to news that a Democrat in the Minnesota legislature had been assassinated and another wounded. The gunman, Vance Boelter, was later discovered to have a “hit list” of 45 elected Democrats.
The result was palpable unease. The Big Bend Sentinel attended Saturday’s event and spoke to people in the crowd, many of whom didn’t want their images taken or their names recorded, citing numerous cases of people being deported or otherwise disappeared in recent weeks for expressing dissident viewpoints. True to Alpine’s borderland roots, many of the signs called for immigration reform — one protester wanted to “Melt ICE” and another called for compassion for migrants in Spanish.
Clifton Ladd was happy to talk about his sign, which read: “THANK YOU US ARMY, NO KINGS SINCE 1775.” “I didn’t want the demonstration to take away from the fact that this is the 250th anniversary of the formation of the U.S. Army,” he explained. “That’s a pretty major thing — I don’t like that Trump wanted to somehow hijack this and make it about him and his birthday.”
Ladd stayed at the protest through the end of the event and witnessed the arrest. He felt that the incident was not unprovoked — he and the rest of the crowd saw the red Dodge drive by several times, hurling insults and driving dangerously close to the parking lane, where many of the protesters were standing.
He wasn’t sure why law enforcement waited to respond until after someone got hurt. “I don’t want to think that the sheriff was somehow politically motivated to sit back and let things happen — I have felt for a long time that the Brewster County Sheriff’s Office is very professional,” he said. “They do a really good job, but it’s been hard for me to reconcile Saturday’s inaction from what I had previously perceived as their professionalism.”
Katie Cruger-Keenan, a local artist and businesswoman, said that the young men in the red truck weren’t the first to try to get a rise out of the crowd — there was a woman in a “Make America Great Again” hat weaving through the throngs, filming people. At one point, the woman got uncomfortably close to Cruger-Keenan’s husband, and she had to make a split-second decision about how to de-escalate the situation. “With everything that’s been going on, we were a little bit scared to be honest,” she said. “We were all tense, but we were trying to focus on our goal for the day, which was getting the message out.”
Cruger-Keenan took a video of Sheriff Ronny Dodson leading the three men inside the truck into the courthouse while the crowd cheered in the background. She thought the situation had been handled — until she saw the department’s Facebook post later that evening, which quickly garnered over 300 comments, mostly from angry pro-Trump locals wishing harm upon the protesters. “It antagonized an entire town to be violent,” she said. “That’s the opposite of what you’re supposed to be doing as a police officer.”
“It was obvious what they were trying to do — they’re trying to be like, ‘Oh, these crazy liberals, they don’t love their country,’” Cruger-Keenan continued. “That’s the opposite of the truth.”
Sheriff Dodson said that stoking an online flame war wasn’t his intent, only that he’d gotten numerous media inquiries about the protest and wanted to put basic information online as soon as possible. He said that his department hadn’t had any communication with the organizers of the event, so they weren’t sure what to expect — all they had to go on was the media coverage of protests in other parts of the country, which had prompted some Republican governors — like Texas’s own Greg Abbott — to pre-emptively call in the military.
In Brewster County, a permit to gather on the courthouse lawn is only needed if the event is expected to attract over 500 people, so no commissioners or other county staff were advised that the protest was going to take place. “We just accidentally saw it on Facebook the week before,” Dodson said.
At past protests, Dodson’s department — alongside the Alpine Police Department — has offered cruiser escorts and officers on the ground, but without an official invitation, they weren’t sure how to proceed. (In some protest movements, tipping off or involving the police in any way is controversial.) “I didn’t want to go down there and make it look like I thought it was something bad,” he said. “So we were all in the courthouse, watching the cameras.”
Dodson said he was more conservative in his approach compared to some of his colleagues — one agency wanted to bring in personnel with riot gear, but that proposal got shot down. Some locals had asked if they could organize a counter-protest across the street, but he told them he didn’t think it was the best idea.
While the Alpine protest was branded as a “No Kings” protest in solidarity with over 2,000 similar events around the country and attended by people with local party affiliations, no one organization claimed the role of official host. Holly Blankenship, an Alpine mom involved with the Brewster County Democrats, said that she’d like to see more communication with local officials moving forward. “I’m sure there’s going to be another protest,” she said. “My personal goal is to have more involvement with the community and to have more of a conversation with county and city officials and have them help as well, so we don’t have incidents like what happened on Saturday.”
Shane O’Neal, representing 53-year-old Craig Andrew Campbell — the man facing charges — said that his client didn’t mean to hurt anyone. “Mr. Campbell was peacefully participating in a protest,” O’Neal said. “What he regrets more than anything is that this story is detracting from the message that he and others were advocating for, which is that the Trump administration is disregarding the law and is using power in a way that is going unchecked.”
The Sentinel also spoke with the family of the alleged victim, who did not want to be named or quoted but confirmed the account reported in public records by the Brewster County Sheriff’s Office.