Apr 6, 2025 7 min read

How many people protested at Hands Off Miami on April 5th, 2025?

A group of women hold up signs with various messages protesting Donald Trump. In the background there are about 100 protesters, though the photo only captures a small area where the protesters were early on in the protest. Photo Credit Philip Cardella Copyright 2025.

How many people protested at Hands Off Miami on Saturday, April 5^th? The first report NBC South Florida 6 posted that “dozens” throughout “South Florida” (a designation that includes Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade County’s six million residents) protested with Hands Off. NBC South Florida 6 later updated it to “hundreds” in South Florida with three hundred in Miami. The local Spanish-speaking station Telemundo 51 likewise said that there were 300 at the Miami protest.

NBC 6 South Florida's headline reads "Dozens gather throughout South Florida to protest President Trump's administration. About two dozen people on Saturday showed up in Tarmac with their signs.

NBC 6 South Florida copy on their story reads "People across the country and in South Florida are making their voices heard as demonstrators joined in a national day of protest against Donald Trump and his administration. About two dozen people on Saturday showed up in Tamarac with their signs. Some of those signs read "End Citizens United," while others said "Hands off our Medicaid, Social Security and free speech." All over the U.S., people gather to protest government cuts, immigration crackdowns and tariffs. President Trump's newest tariff's start at a 10% tax on all imported goods. Now, panic is setting in at grocery stores because shoppers are bracing to pay even more for much of what they need. People also protested Saturday in Miami, Hollywood, Deerfield and Boca Raton. — The original story copy on the Hands Off protests did not give any number other than "two dozen people" in Tamarac.

Telemundo 51's segment on the Hands Off Miami Protest. While the broadcast is in Spanish, more than half the interviews were in English.

Meanwhile, WSVN 7, a South Florida Fox affiliate station, reported that "about 700 people gathered in front of the Torch of Friendship to let their voices be heard." The Miami Herald estimated that 1,000 protested at Miami’s Torch of Friendship and another 2,000 protested in Ft. Lauderdale, just up the road. That doesn’t include the highly publicized protest near 47’s Palm Beach County mansion, Mara-Lago, nor the “two dozen” NBC 6’s story focused on in Tamarac, Florida, a city of 72,000 on the edge of The Everglades in Broward County.

Miami Herald headline reads "Trump protests draw thousands in South Florida. 'Can't sit home any longer'

The copy in the Herald's story explicitly said "around 1,000 people who gathered at the Troch of Friendship in downtown Miami."

So how many were at Hands Off Miami?

A Miami Indivisible Banner at the Hands Off Miami event. Photo Credit Philip Cardella Copyright 2025.

A priest at the protest told me that his church seats 800 and that he wasn’t sure how many were at Hands Off Miami but guessed about 2,000 based on how many times the crowd would fill his church. One of the organizers with Miami Indivisible, who helped organize Hands Off Miami said she personally counted 2,000 and thought she missed some, saying the estimate of 300 is “ridiculous.” Still, counting a moving blob of people that never were even asked to look in the same direction or stand still would be a challenge, to say the very least.

Telemundo's national coverage on the protest. The main reporter is Miami based and that's the protest she reported from. This one is almost entirely in Spanish, sorry.

While Telemundo’s national coverage of the events indicated a large national protest, including Miami, NBC 6 chose to link to a video from Washington, DC, that appears to suggest just a dozen people showed up to that protest when The Guardian reported that “tens of thousands” descended on the nation’s capitol for the event.

The NBC 6 South Florida webpage with headline "Angry protesters from New York to Alaska assail Trump and Musk in 'Hands Off!' rallies. But the video is to a story by Jessica Albert of News 4 in Washington DC. If you watch the video (click on this image) you'll see it makes it look like a dozen people showed up in DC. What the video is really about is some old ladies out to welcome visitors to the protest--in Washington DC.

In video I shot at the event and in the photos I took I don’t see more than 150 in any picture. That said, no photo or video segment I shot even tried to represent all of the people at the protest (most of the photos I took intentionally focus on one subject, such as a protester with a sign or even a sign, you know, the way photographers tend to do).

A protestor in Miami holds a sign that reads "Save the Civil Service, Save the Country!" You can see just three people total in the image as the photo's subject is the woman with the sign. Photo Credit Philip Cardella Copyright 2025.

The road the protest was on, Biscayne Blvd. is divided by a parking lot right down the middle. There were protesters on both sides of the road. The majority were at the Torch of Friendship on the eastern side of the road, where all of my photos and video were shot. I never crossed to the other side to even take a guess as to how many were over there.

An annotated Apple Maps view of where the protest was. The arrow points to a star where the Torch of Friendship is. The red circle was where the main bulk of the protesters were. The blue rectangles highlight the parking lots down the median of Biscayne Blvd. The red soft corner rectangle was the secondary location for protesters. At one point the protesters marched from the Torch of Friendship on the east side of Biscayne Blvd, to Freedom Tower on the west side of Biscayne Blvd, back down the street on the west side and crossed back over to the Torch of Friendship.

There was no central stage at the event, no dais from which people spoke. In fact, competing megaphones sometimes made it difficult to hear what the organizers were trying to say or what leaders were trying to chant.

A protester with a megaphone leads part of the crowd in a cheer. Photo Credit Philip Cardella Copyright 2025.

There was an epicenter, if you will, around the Torch of Friendship, the planned meeting place for the protest. In many ways, the protest was more disorganized than the events I’ve seen footage of in other cities and states. This meant that the crowd at Hands Off Miami was never in the same spot together and was at its most compacted spread over about a third of a mile of Biscayne Blvd. Also, as is always the case with protests like this, people came and went, so any snapshot in time, photographic or otherwise, could not represent the full number of protesters.

Protesters marching to Freedom Tower. Photo credit Philip Cardella Copyright 2025.

What the photos do show is the area by the Torch of Friendship, which I’d estimate to be about 350 feet by 100 feet (about the size of a football field with endzones), was usually full to the point that I imagine would give a fire marshal pause and that was only the epicenter of the protest that day.

I have a hard time discounting the priest’s estimate based on what would fill his worship space or the organizer who said she counted, even if counting that mass would be difficult. Was it 300? 700? 1,000? 2000? More?

While pondering this, I kept coming back to NBC South Florida 6 and Telemundo 51 having that same low-end number. This didn't seem a coincidence. Then I remembered something--NBC/Comcast now owns Telemundo. Telemundo's national broadcast, along with their massive production studio that makes soap operas among other things, is in Doral, a suburb of Miami in Miami-Dade County. Telemundo 51, on the other hand, is based out of Miramar, a suburb of Ft. Lauderdale, in Broward County. Also noteworthy is that Telemundo 51 shares its studio with NBC South Florida 6.

Telemundo Center, the national HQ, is in Doral, a suburb of Miami in Miami-Dade County. Telemundo 51 is based out of Miramar, a suburb of Ft. Lauderdale in Broward County and it shares a building with NBC South Florida 6. Map is from Apple Maps, the picture of the tower is from Google.

If you look at the Telemundo 51 video again, you'll notice in one of the interviews in English (starting at 1:38) the reporter actually challenges the person he's interviewing, insisting that Miami is now a Trump County after many years of being Democratic. This is a factual statement as of November, but many years is doing a lot of work as it would be much more accurate to say decades. The reporter cut himself into the video he submitted to say that Miami is Trump country. This is a bit odd because, as the recent elections in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and even Florida have shown, the entire country has moved away from Trump--at least for the moment. To assert that Miami-Dade County, which has historically been a Democratic stronghold, permanently shifted to the Republican Party in November, is an opinion. Current national trends suggest that the protester's opinion was more consistent with the facts than the reporter's, which is hardly the point. The reporter's opinion has no place in a story about a protest he's covering.

The video should be queued to where the reporter challenges the protester's facts.

Odder still is that I have not been able to find video of the NBC South Florida 6 reporter actually at any of the protests--and certainly not at the Torch of Friendship protest. If I had to guess, the reporter at NBC South Florida 6 simply borrowed the story from the Telemundo 51 reporter, who, unlike the Telemundo national desk, The Miami Herald and other TV stations in South Florida, felt the need to inject his opinion about Miami and Trump, into the story.

It appears that the Telemundo 51 reporter let his bias get in the way of covering the protests factually. It also appears that the NBC South Florida 6 reporter pulled his story from his colleague at the station, rather than writing an original piece. I have a difficult time trusting the estimate of 300 protesters.

24, 300, 700, 1000, 2000 or more.

What do you think?