There are now more than 400 Visibility Brigades active across the U.S. in 48 states. These are groups of people who take large banners and hold them on bridges over highways, promoting democracy while criticizing various actions of the Trump administration. All these groups have operated with no legal threat, except for the Connecticut Visibility Brigade, which was founded in New Haven, Connecticut just as Trump took office for the second time on Jan. 20, 2025.
Katherine Hinds, the leader of the Connecticut brigade, was arrested twice in 2025 by the same state trooper, who insisted that what her group was doing was illegal. She was charged both criminally and civilly. Hinds’ criminal charges were later dismissed and the ACLU of Connecticut represented her in the civil case, which resulted in a victory for free speech and a clarification of the state regulation defining highway distraction violations.
Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Hinds, who describes how the judge brought both sides together for a mutually agreeable outcome and protection of First Amendment speech and protest. The brigade and others across the U.S. will be promoting and participating in the No Kings Day national protest on Saturday, March 28.
KATHERINE HINDS: We have been doing this for more than a year now. And the very first time we went up, which was Valentine’s Day 2025, we had a state trooper come up and tell us we couldn’t do it. So everything that happened last year, we kept going up on the bridges, deciding not to “obey in advance,” and it caught up with us. I got arrested twice on the same criminal charges and then the ACLU, who I had been looking to for advice all along about our civil rights being abridged, moved in and filed a suit against the state, asking them basically to leave us alone because what we were doing was not illegal.
We talk about it being a new form of media because it’s authentic, it’s hyper-local, it’s issues-oriented, it’s informative. You see who’s behind the messaging. So often now with disinformation and misinformation, we have to try to track down sources.
Who’s telling me this? And in our case, we’re personal. We are able to scramble to get up a message that’s extremely current. It’s taken off for that reason. People are tired of social media and people attacking other people anonymously. And it’s created, I think, a sense of societal divisiveness that being on a bridge is very direct and immediate. And we have people coming up and saying, “What are you talking about? I don’t agree with you.” And so we’re able to engage with people. It’s both sides of the road, as it were. We get our message out to everybody, whether they like it or not. And then we track what we call signs of engagement so that we know who’s liking the message and who’s not. And it’s about, I’d say it’s 90 to 10 that we’re getting positive feedback and 10 percent negative people flipping us off or yelling, “Get a job” or whatever.
MELINDA TUHUS: Tell me about the legal case. And I wanted to know how precedent setting it was, if it was. KATHERINE HINDS: We didn’t really want to break the law. We wanted to color within the lines, but we also wanted to make sure that we weren’t being pushed down because of what our messaging is. And so we kept pushing it until the point that I got arrested on criminal charges. And this was a great education for me because I went back to the ACLU and said, “Okay, I got arrested. What now?”
And they said, “Well, unfortunately, these are criminal charges and we’re civil rights attorneys, so we can’t help you with that.” So I had to go out and find a criminal lawyer to defend me in the first two hearings that we had in court. The second time I got arrested, it was because the trooper self-dispatched. He wrote himself a warrant for my arrest and took it to a judge and got it signed and came to my house at 6 in the morning.
And that was out of bounds that people kind of sat up and started paying notice. It was pretty scary and pretty much textbook fascist move—I hate to say that—but grabbed me basically out of my pajamas and handcuffed me and put me in a car and drove me to Bridgeport.
So criminal charges in both cases were dropped. And then the ACLU was preparing this civil rights case that was asking for a temporary injunction against the troopers. And they gathered a lot of evidence, the trooper’s video cameras that they wear showing all the interactions and all the ways that we had tried to color within the lines. How polite we were, etc. I mean, none of that stuff matters. It was really just us being told we couldn’t do something that was happening in every other state at this point, except for West Virginia, Missouri and all around Connecticut.
It was just us. So the hearing, we had two plaintiffs who had to stay off the bridges for six months while this whole thing lurched along through the judicial system. And they were deposed by the state and their case was they were feeling intimidated by the troopers because—being the way we’ve been harassed on five separate occasions. And so they were asking to be left alone.
We had really done a lot of due diligence in this way. We had a traffic safety expert in our crew who had helped edit the state regulations on what constitutes distractions and what’s allowed on bridges. So after a couple of hours of back and forthing, both sides agreed on new language that would go out to the troopers as a special order, basically saying what these protesters are doing on overpasses very specifically is legal. And as long as they’re not standing in the roadway, attaching things to the fences in a permanent fashion, etc. etc., then they need to be allowed to do this.
After the hearing was adjourned, the judge and people were just sort of milling around. The judge came down and said to the protesters, “I just want to thank you for what you’re doing. It’s really important that people stand up.”
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