When lawmakers returned to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, they were met not just by colleagues and cameras but by a collection of protests that reflected the overlapping anxieties of American politics right now.
Outside Union Station and along the steps of the Capitol, demonstrators gathered with placards reading “Free DC” and “Shut Down ICE.” Their presence was a reminder that debates over immigration, voting rights, and federal authority remain unsettled and deeply felt.
One group, FLARE—short for For Liberation and Resistance Everywhere—focused on an issue that has gained traction across ideological lines: the government’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. “It’s really a privilege to be here to petition your government for redresses, and that’s what we’re doing,” one volunteer said. The group’s demands mirror a bipartisan push from Reps. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, and Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, who are pressing for the Department of Justice to release what it knows about Epstein and his network. That rare partnership has become one of the more unusual and potentially consequential alliances in Congress this year.
Nearby, another set of protesters chose a more theatrical form of dissent. Women in red robes and white bonnets, dressed as handmaids from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, marched to highlight the rollback of reproductive rights in the United States. One protestor said, “We do not want any more rights taken away, not only from women but from immigrants or anyone that’s marginalized. We are here to march. We are here to put our feet down and say, ‘No more.’”
Since its publication in 1985, Atwood’s novel has offered a chilling vision of a society where women’s bodies and freedoms are controlled by the state. Its television adaptation on Hulu helped push it back into the cultural mainstream, topping Kindle and Audible charts in 48 states in 2017. Protesters on Tuesday turned that fiction into a visual shorthand for the fears many women’s rights activists say are already becoming reality.
