WASHINGTON – Daniel Kingery, a longtime resident of McPherson Square Park and the surrounding area, was arrested yesterday as police moved in to confiscate his protest kiosk that has stood for many years.
Social media posts showed Metropolitan Police Department officers removing his moving protest boards and taking him into custody on Thursday near the McPherson Square Metro Station.
Kingery, now in his sixties, first pitched his belongings there during the pandemic and quickly became one of the most recognizable figures in the area. He treated the public space as a kind of open-air forum, posting passages from the Constitution, staging what he described as political demonstrations, and building small structures that blurred the line between shelter and soapbox.
The Youtuber “Mar of the People” filmed the arrest on his Youtube channel.
Kingery has had previous encounters with police. When city and federal authorities cleared a homeless encampment in McPherson Square in early 2023, he resisted and was taken into custody. In the months that followed, witnesses described him returning to the park’s perimeter with makeshift setups—a cart or kiosk draped with handwritten signs—that served both as a living space and a stage for protest.
In the years since, Kingery has remained a fixture near the McPherson Square Metro entrance. Local advocacy groups and downtown workers alike came to know him as a kind of protester-in-residence, whose displays attracted both sympathy and irritation.
The dismantling of Kingery’s kiosk echoes the recent removal of theWhite House Peace Vigil in Lafayette Square, just a block from where he was arrested. That encampment had stood outside the White House for 44 years before being cleared, after President Donald Trump learned of its displays during a White House event and directed aides to take it down.
Social media reports show pictures of Kingery back outside the McPherson Square Metro station later in the day. Formal charges have not been disclosed by the police department as of this time.
