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Florida Cities Protest President-Elect Donald Trump

RACHEL IACOVONE

Miami joined the growing list of cities to host Anti-Trump protests Friday night, following president-elect Donald Trump’s victory last Tuesday.  Miami Police said there were more than 2000 people involved.  

That crowd included FAU student Caitlyn Rittenhouse, who said she has concerns about a Trump presidency as a member of the LGBT community.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meQqhYBxZMI

“We fought so hard to get, like, equal rights, you know? With jobs, you know, like, marriage everywhere — and now, I mean, him and Mike Pence, they’re going to take it away,” said Rittenhouse.

Palm Beach State College student Aiyana Marrero agreed with Rittenhouse.  

“I do want to be married one day, and it’s very well a possibility that it could be reversed for same-sex marriage, which is, like, something my girlfriend and I quite literally cried about,” said Marrero.

The peaceful protesters started their march at Bayfront Park, where Trump hosted one of his last rallies of the election a little more than a week earlier. 

But not every rally goer was for the “Not My President” cause. Some folks argued about giving Hillary Clinton’s money to Donald Trump.

Despite such squabbles and one incident of bottles being thrown at the crowd from a nearby condominium, the protest remained relatively peaceful. That was good news to many, including, Venezuelan-born Fabio Tramonte who said protests like these may continue. 

“If he’s going to run this country for four years, eight years maybe, he’s going to have to deal with this a lot because he has to prove me wrong of what I’m saying — that he’s not a fascist, that he’s not a sexist,” said Tramonte. “As an immigrant, a legal immigrant, I’m insulted."

Throughout the night, marchers blocked sections of four of Miami’s major highways.  A much smaller group of people protested Friday night in downtown Fort Myers.  

Rachel Iacovone is a reporter and associate producer of Gulf Coast Live for WGCU News. Rachel came to WGCU as an intern in 2016, during the presidential race. She went on to cover Florida Gulf Coast University students at President Donald Trump's inauguration on Capitol Hill and Southwest Floridians in attendance at the following day's Women's March on Washington.Rachel was first contacted by WGCU when she was managing editor of FGCU's student-run media group, Eagle News. She helped take Eagle News from a weekly newspaper to a daily online publication with TV and radio branches within two years, winning the 2016 Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Award for Best Use of Multimedia in a cross-platform series she led for National Coming Out Day. She also won the Mark of Excellence Award for Feature Writing for her five-month coverage of an FGCU student's transition from male to female.As a WGCU reporter, she produced the first radio story in WGCU's Curious Gulf Coast project, which answered the question: Does SWFL Have More Cases of Pediatric Cancer?Rachel graduated from Florida Gulf Coast University with a bachelor's degree in journalism.