Outside of Houston’s Shell Energy Stadium on October 25, 2025, a group of area residents gathered outside a campaign rally of presidential candidate and Vice President Kamala Harris to drive awareness of the U.S. administration’s material support for genocide in Gaza and demand that the U.S. stop supplying weapons to Israel.
The effort was organized by a coalition of groups that included Palestinian Youth Movement, Houston for Palestinian Liberation, and Al Awda, a group that supports the right of Palestinian peoples to return to their original lands in what is now the state of Israel. The rally’s message:
“If you want to beat Donald Trump, get Kamala Harris to stop killing Arab people!”
While the group chanted outside, about 10 protesters, not formally associated with any group, went inside to disrupt the Harris rally. There they faced hostility and were later accused by a writer for India Today of backing Donald Trump. Two of the protestors contacted Deceleration to share their experiences. We agreed not to share their identities in order to protect them from the extreme backlash that some pro-Palestinian activists have faced for their efforts.
The 29-year-old man who said he lived in the Houston area said he joined the protest because he believes the Biden administration is responsible for the atrocities committed using the funds and weaponry the United States has provided to Israel. United Nations experts have agreed that Israel’s actions in Palestine since the October 7, 2023, which have killed over 16,000 children and destroyed the region’s crucial infrastructure, meet the definition of genocide.
“If I pay somebody to kill somebody else, then that makes me just as guilty as the person who pulled the trigger,” he told Deceleration. “So by that logic, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are fully committing genocide, and they don’t deserve peace.”
The woman, who is 43-year-old Muslim resident of Houston, told us that their group of “concerned citizens” has also protested appearances by politicians from both major political parties, including Governor Greg Abbott, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, and Cruz’s Democratic opponent, Texas U.S. Representative Colin Allred, as well as Houston Mayor John Whitmire. “Our city is investing in Israeli bonds, and we’re demanding divestment, and so it’s important for us to kind of show up in person, because it’s harder to ignore when it’s right in front of your face,” she said.
The woman said she felt under suspicion waiting in line for three hours because she was wearing a hijab. She said she later required medical attention from both sun exposure and extreme anxiety caused by the hostile crowd.
As Vice President Harris took the stage, a member of their activist group unfurled a Palestinian flag, only to have other rally-goers attempt to tear it from her hands. “The people in the crowd around her got very aggressive with her,” the man from the group said. “They started screaming in her face, [but] luckily, she didn’t get assaulted.”
As the first protester began to be escorted out by security, the man began chanting. Footage posted to social media shows the chaos which erupted around him. A thrown water bottle can be seen striking him in the head. “As I’m calling [Harris] a war criminal, people started throwing things at me, they started throwing trash.” He said that the adrenaline of the moment kept him from feeling the blow, but the water bottle left a bump on his head which was sore for days afterward.
As the crowd attempted to drown him out, he succeeded in interrupting Harris’s speech multiple times. Harris responded:
“Just send them to that small rally down the street … some people don’t have a great sense of direction, but we’ll show him the way.”
Other media reports have highlighted the massive crowd that came to see Harris, along with special guest star Beyoncé, and described the relief many Texas women felt in hearing a presidential candidate directly address the loss of bodily autonomy they’ve suffered since the fall of Roe v. Wade. But for those who continue to demand that Harris and the Democratic Party shift their policy on Palestine, the crowd had a more sinister atmosphere.
While the woman acknowledged the importance of bodily autonomy and the harm caused by the loss of reproductive rights, she said her ethics do not allow her to ignore the suffering in Gaza. She said many Muslim Americans like her feel abandoned by the Democrats and the left.
“I seem to most of the time, receive hostility, sometimes outright rage, because they view me now as the enemy, that I am undermining democracy, that I am taking away from their numbers, that I am factionalizing the left, when all I’m concerned about, and all Muslims in general are concerned about, is that our people are being slaughtered.”
