Nearly A Dozen Protesters Were Arrested At Mitch McConnell's Office — And They're Not Done Fighting

On Wednesday (December 18), President Donald Trump was impeached from the Home of Representative. And on Thursday (December 19), Anthony Torres was arrested.


That morning, the 25-year-old communications and political director for the activist categorize By the People had marched with about 50 other people to the capitol in a push to “set the terms of the public debate for [President Donald] Trump's trial” in the Senate. Carrying massive blue signs that read “Your choice/The constitution/or Trump,” they went directly to Senate Majority Mitch McConnell’s office and asked him to vote to remove the president from office. That’s any time Capitol Police warned them: in the event you stay, we’re going to have to arrest you.


“We prepared for that, and we were committing civil disobedience,” Torres told MTV News. Although he and the other activists stood their ground. “These offices are actually for us,” he added. “We have to be using our bodies and our voices to disrupt agency as usual… So we occupied the office of Senator Mitch McConnell, Most of them Leader, because Mitch McConnell has made very clear for now that he's chosen his side, and his side isn't the people.”


Torres says he’s “a little exhausted” from the wild day he had — which required waking up at dawn, protesting with dozens of other activists in the freezing cold, and getting arrested. Nevertheless the months he’s spent lobbying for the president’s impeachment have mostly invigorated him overall.


Torres began working with By the People as a volunteer in August of 2018, and joined the categorize full-time as a staffer in September of this year. The timing was no accident — that month, news broke that a whistleblower had filed a report connected with a June, following a phone call in which Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate 2016 election interference based on a conspiracy theory, and to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter Biden. The complaint brought the specifics of that call into the forefront of the national conversation and ultimately led to Trump’s impeachment on the grounds of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.


By the People had been working to impeach the president long before the impeachment vote and the Ukraine scandal. Founded immediately after Trump’s election, the categorize started asking Congresspeople to sign a pledge that they would work to impeach the president in February of this year; Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) signed onto the letter.


“This movement, Trump's impeachment, is about so much more [than Ukraine],” Torres mentioned. “It's about a rejection of three years of Trump's corruption, racism criminality, and around laying forth a democracy that actually serves the interests of all of us, rather than just being abused for the personalized benefit of the prosperous and powerful few, like Trump.”


For Torres and plenty of other activists, this is just the starting. “Impeachment isn't enough — removal is how we'll put an end to the evils of the Trump administration,” he mentioned. Whether the President loses his job before the term is up is a decision that has to be made by the Senate, who won’t be voting, or even holding a trial, up until immediately after they return from holiday break. Torres sees that as more time to prepare his voice heard: “That means also bringing non-violent and moral protest to the halls of power,” he adds.


The categorize is currently focused on contacting senators and asking every one of these to vote to convict the president. Given that the Senate is now operated by a Republican majority, such a flip can feel like a uphill battle given that several conservative Senators are presenting a united front in defending Trump's actions. Nevertheless Torres isn't giving up although — for him, the stakes are simply also high.


pick between upholding your oath and removing Trump," he warns, "or protecting Trump and betraying our country.”