A picture of the No Kings protest in October 2025 at the Collingswood PATCO station.
In light of national No Kings protests that were expected to take place around the country on March 28, one local group with members in Cherry Hill prepared its own march for Camden County.
Cooper River Indivisible’s (CRI) Camden protest was expected to be among more than 60 in the county and around the state. Nationally, about 9 million protesters were expected at thousands of sites around the nation.
The March 28 No Kings protest marks the third time Americans have collectively joined forces to oppose the policies of President Donald Trump since he took office for his second term in January 2025. The first two were in June and October of last year.
CRI’s 2025 protests took place in Collingswood and Haddon Heights, with an estimated 7,000 people in June and about 8,000 in October.
CRI founder Craig Strimel predicted the Camden protest would draw between 2,000 and 10,000 protesters and include Congressman Donald Norcross and Sen. Andy Kim.
The group began in 2017 during Trump’s first term and has members around the county, including Haddon Heights.
Strimel said initially their membership tended to skew older, as those are the people that tend to have more time on their hands, but especially during Trump’s second term, they’ve seen a more diverse group of people join.
“We still trend a little bit older and a little bit suburban population,” Strimel said. “But this one thing that everyone I know in the organization takes so seriously that the whole movement nationwide is going to require diversity in general, but especially younger people. Different populations from different parts of our community. And so I think we’re definitely starting to see that.”
Looking at one metric, at the beginning of 2025, CRI had about 1,500 followers on Facebook, a page that’s existed since it was founded in 2017.
But in the past year, they’ve increased to 8,700 followers.
Strimel said that up until 2025, CRI didn’t get as organized as they have been in the past year.
“For years it wasn’t real sophisticated. Like now, we’re operating now at a pretty sophisticated level,” Strimel said. “Like a whole media team, that’s all they do. Everything kind of ramped up during the second term. I think people really started to realize ‘ok, we need to be dedicated to this.'”
Since 2025, Strimel said that people that have shown up since 2025 have been more dedicated than before too.
“People signed up for committees, signed up for work, and it’s pretty incredible,” Strimel said. “And even at the leadership, it’s the same 15 to 20 people that are basically running Cooper River Indivisible that were back in, from that February, March and April is really when that leadership team was put into place and they stuck with it.”
And CRI isn’t just a group that exists when these big protests pop up.
They hosted events in the lead up to the March 28 protest to make signs, their mutual aid team volunteers at food banks, and they’ve hosted smaller protests like outside of the Citizens Bank near Wegmans along Route 70 and participating in anti-ICE protests like in Lindenwold after ICE agents performed a raid on an apartment complex while students were waiting for their bus.
And last August, CRI helped organize opposition to an ordinance that would have punished people from loitering in public areas past sunset which didn’t pass due to the large outpouring of public opposition to the ordinance.
“Basically it was going to criminalize homelessness,” Strimel said. “That’s on a super local level. We weren’t the only ones that showed up, but we helped make sure that the room was overflowing with residents to speak out against that ordinance.”
The organization even has committees, like ones on immigration, reproductive rights and education, where they talk about what the chapter is doing in those areas and holds monthly meetings to discuss reports from those committees.
In spite of everything done under the Trump administration, like the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by ICE officers, Strimel said CRI has still managed to give people a sense of community that many were missing during the pandemic.
“We’re living in a pretty horrific time in our history,” Strimel said. “And we’re creating new friendships, new relationships out of that. And that’s kind of incredible. People are learning, ok this may not be ideal. We’ll say sometimes, ‘yeah, none of us want to be doing this work,’ but we’re also looking around us and we’re realizing ‘wow, I was pretty lonely during the pandemic and now I have more friends than I know what to do with.'”
