Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell ate lunch with Kentucky’s outgoing House Majority Floor Leader, Jonathan Shell, on Saturday. A crowd of protesters was waiting outside. When the two politicians finished their lunch and left the restaurant, the protesters began chanting, “Vote you out! Vote you out!”
A man’s voice can be heard shouting, “Where are the babies, Mitch?” in an apparent reference to the children separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border. A woman yells, “What are you doing to get the babies back?” One man can be heard yelling, faintly, “Turtlehead!” Then a man calls out, “We know where you live, Mitch.”
The protesters then begin chanting “Abolish ICE! Abolish ICE!”
Neither McConnell nor Shell said anything. As the men drive away, the protesters can be heard on the video congratulating each other. “We did good,” one of them says.
Shell told the Courier Journal that the protesters were “a small group of extremists.” He also said that the protester calling out “we know where you live, Mitch” was making a “not-so-subtle threat right out of the Maxine Waters playbook.”
Last month, protesters angry about the separation of families at the border confronted McConnell and his wife, Transporation Secretary Elaine Chao, as they were leaving a dinner at Georgetown University.
Protesters have also confronted Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of Homeland Security, over the administration’s immigration policies.
On Twitter, people angry at the administration’s immigration policies applauded the protesters. Here are a few of their tweets:
A group of Louisville residents, including several @DemSocialists members, had a message for Mitch McConnell as he left a local restaurant today. Powerful people like Mitch deserve no peace while they enable the imprisonment of babies in concentration camps. #AbolishICE