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More AIDS activists arrested when protesting global funding cuts

WASHINGTON DC HIV AIDS Protesters are detained

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Protesters are detained after disrupting a closed House Foreign Relations Committee briefing with U.S. Agency for International Development Deputy Administrator-Designate Pete Marocco at the Rayburn House Office Building Wednesday in Washington, D.C. M

Eleven were arrested outside of a U.S. House committee meeting.

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AIDS activists were arrested again Wednesday while protesting the Trump administration’s cuts to funding to fight the disease globally. This follows arrests that were made during protests February 13 and 26.

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U.S. Capitol Police arrested 11 protesters who were demonstrating outside a House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C., the Washington Bladereports. They were charged with “crowding, obstructing, or incommoding,” police told the Blade.

The committee was meeting with Pete Marocco, deputy administrator-designate at the U.S. Agency for International Development — an agency that Donald Trump and Elon Musk have largely defunded. The protesters held signs with slogans including “Marocco lies people with AIDS die,” “Marocco’s homophobia transphobia kills,” and “Marocco’s ‘waiver’ is a deadly lie.” They chanted, “Marocco has blood on his hands.”

The demonstrators were denouncing the elimination of USAID funding — something the U.S. Supreme Court has ordered Trump to restore. The agency provides money to combat HIV and AIDS, other diseases, and poverty worldwide. They also called for full restoration of funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR. The administration has said PEPFAR, a global program fighting HIV and AIDS, was exempt from a freeze on foreign aid, but some PEPFAR contractors are still awaiting payment.

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Nicholas Enrich, acting assistant administrator for USAID Global Health, has condemned the withholding of funds. “USAID’s failure to implement lifesaving humanitarian assistance under the waiver is the result of political leadership at USAID, the Department of State, and DOGE [the Department of Government Efficiency], who have created and continue to create intentional and/or unintentional obstacles that have wholly prevented implementation,” he wrote in a February 28 memo quoted by the Blade. “These actions include the refusal to pay for assistance activities conducted or goods and services rendered, the blockage and restriction of access to USAID’s payment systems followed by the creation of new and ineffective processes for payments, the ever-changing guidance as to what qualifies as ‘lifesaving’ and whose approval is needed in making that decision, and most recently, the sweeping terminations of the most critical implementing mechanisms necessary for providing lifesaving services.” Enrich has now been placed on administrative leave.

More than 30 HIV activists and fired foreign aid workers held a “die-in” February 26 in the rotunda of the Cannon House Office Building to protest the administration’s cuts to this aid, including lifesaving drugs, and 21 were arrested. Five protesters were arrested after disrupting a House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting February 13.

Support for PEPFAR, started by Republican President George W. Bush, has come from all sides of the political spectrum. There will be a pro-PEPFAR rally Friday in D.C., and Kathryn Jean Lopez of the National Review,a conservative publication, promoted it in an article posted Thursday.

“It is not an anti-Trump rally,” Lopez wrote. “It is not opposed to all the USAID cleanup. But good things are getting lost in the process and, honestly, if Vice President JD Vance wants to follow through on some of what he said last Friday at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast about working out Catholic social teaching in public life, he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio should make sure waivers really happen and the program survives on the medical, faithfulness, and mentorship pillars on which it was established.”

Also, the George W. Bush Policy Institute posted an article noting that PEPFAR contractors are still having difficulty accessing funds. Sixty percent of PEPFAR aid is distributed through USAID, Hannah Johnson pointed out. “This Administration must ensure that PEPFAR’s work continues — whether through USAID, the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], the Pentagon, or the State Department,” she wrote. “It is a matter of life and death.”

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