Protesters said they came to hold Secretary of State Marco Rubio ‘accountable for the flat-out lies’ about U.S. global HIV aid
About 10 activists from various HIV/AIDS groups were arrested Tuesday morning, June 2, at the entrance to a hearing room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building where Secretary of State Marco Rubio was about to brief members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the U.S. war with Iran. The protesters were there to call out what they said was the Trump administration’s ongoing sabotage of PEPFAR, the U.S. global AIDS relief program overseen by the State Department. They sat down on the hallway floor outside the hearing room, holding signs that read, “Rubio Kills People With AIDS,” and chanting “Rubio lies, people with AIDS die!”
PEPFAR—President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief—is the world’s largest HIV/AIDS initiative, providing funding and support for HIV prevention, treatment, care and related health services in more than 50 countries. Begun under President George W. Bush in 2003, it is credited with saving 26 million lives.
The protesters represented groups including Health GAP, Housing Works, Treatment Action Group (TAG) and ACT UP-NY, all of whom have been fighting the Trump administration’s attacks on PEPFAR since early last year.
According to one of the protesters arrested, TAG government and policy associate Kendall Martinez-Wright, the group had intended to conduct the protest from within the hearing room but were denied access, so they decided to hold the protest just outside its doors.
Another protester, Benjamin Heim Shepard, of Housing Works, said the group sat and chanted for 20 minutes before they were arrested by Capitol Police and released about two and a half hours later.
It was far from the first time protesters from the groups have disrupted business on Capitol Hill since the Trump administration started making dramatic cuts to PEPFAR and its interlocking U.S. global assistance programs, particularly the all-but-decimated USAID, early last year. This time, according to a press release from Health GAP, the activists were “protesting new attacks by Rubio on lifesaving global HIV and health programs” and demanding that “lawmakers block implementation of these plans.”
One of the signs on display at the protest. (photo courtesy of Benjamin Heim Shepherd)
Those new attacks, according to Health GAP, include “abruptly eliminating the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) role in implementing global HIV programs, including CDC’s global capabilities in disease outbreak and surveillance for pandemics beyond HIV.”
As The New York Times reported in April, PEPFAR, which is overseen by the State Department, released that same month data showing “sharp decreases in the numbers of people newly tested, diagnosed and treated for HIV, declines that will have long-term consequences, several public health experts and patient advocates warned.”
In the last quarter of 2025, reported the Times, PEPFAR “supported testing for 17.2 million people, a steep drop from the 21.9 million people tested in the same period in 2024. Diagnoses also fell, to 307,000 from 385,000, a predictable consequence of less testing.”
Activists on June 2 were also protesting, to quote Health GAP, “Rubio’s diversion of $2 billion in congressionally appropriated FY25 global health funding, including $330 million to combat HIV, $250 million to fight malaria, $320 million for maternal and child health programs, and nearly $650 million in global health security programs.”
The government of Zambia said in early May that the Trump administration had tried linking health funding for HIV and hepatitis to access to national health data and to critical rare earth minerals used in defense and high tech. “Activists are demanding the decoupling of these conditions from health funding,” said the Health GAP press release.
Martinez-Wright of the protest said of the protest: “We felt it was imperative to hold [Rubio] accountable for the flat-out lies he continues to shell out in terms of what State is doing in regard to PEPFAR, and also for [his] overreaching in trying to eliminate other programs that PEPFAR works with, such as the CDC. That’s very concerning and disturbing.”
Riding a train back from D.C. to New York later that afternoon, Shepard told POSITIVELY AWARE in a phone call that, “We wanted to have Rubio hear that people are still thinking about PEPFAR—and that people overseas are dying” because of the Trump administration’s dismantling of that and other U.S. global health programs.
Late last year, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, reported that the administration’s decision to shut down USAID “has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths from infectious disease and malnutrition.”
The PEPFAR Impact Tracker, which is run by the Boston University School of Public Health and the HIV Modeling Consortium, estimated early this year that, since early last year, the cuts and closures have resulted in nearly 160,000 adult deaths and nearly 17,000 child deaths worldwide.
Senate hearings are generally open to the public. But, said protester Ryan Foster from ACT UP-NY, “It seems they were leaving only 10 seats open for the public.” However, some protesters from the group Code Pink were able to make it into the hearing, which theydisrupted by loudly demanding that the U.S. government use taxpayer money to fund U.S. healthcare instead of Israel’s military. The Code Pink protesters were soon escorted out.
“They didn’t want people with opinions to air to be in the same room with Rubio,” said Shepard. “But democracy is not a spectator sport—we have to participate.”
Shepard acknowledged that there was no guarantee that the administration would reverse its dismantling of PEPFAR and other global aid programs, even with increased pushback from Congress (whose approved funding for such programs the administration has repeatedly ignored).
“But one way to guarantee not getting something is to not fight for it,” he said. “It’s still worth my time because it’s the right thing to do. The door is still open to save these programs.”
Health GAP posted video of the protest on Instagram.