Protesters on Saturday blocked the roads leading to a Donald Trump rally in Fountain Hills, Arizona.
Video from NBC’s Jacob Rascon showed one driver confronting protesters and screaming at them to get off the road.
Another driver tried to ram through the protesters.
Some of the demonstrators had tied themselves to their cars, making it harder for law enforcement to tow the vehicles.
Lewis Monroy told The Huffington Post that he had been stuck in traffic for almost two hours and said he saw two protesters arrested. Both people were chained to cars, and law enforcement cut the cables and arrested them so they could tow the vehicles, he said. Video shows officers carrying a protester away.
An ABC 15 anchor reported at least three people had been arrested in connection with the protests. Deputy Joaquin Enriquez, a spokesman for the Maricopa County sheriff’s office, told ABC 15 the arrests were for blocking the road, not protesting.
The roadblock didn’t stop some determined people from getting out of their cars and walking to Trump’s rally.
Tomas Robles, executive director of Living United for Change in Arizona, a workers’ rights organization, told HuffPost that law enforcement was cooperative and treated protesters fairly. He said some Trump supporters “did try to get get aggressive,” but they were not violent.
“It was a peaceful protest, we got our point across, and we showed the nation and our state that just because Arizona at a time has been seen as anti-immigrant and somewhat racist, this is not that state anymore,” he said. “We’re not going to allow people like Trump to spew that rhetoric.”
Reports of arrests and violence at Trump rallies have become commonplace. At least 52 people were arrested or cited in connection with Trump events from Feb. 29 to March 14, according to a HuffPost survey of police departments. News reports and police reports for the same period show there were at least 20 incidents of physical violence at Trump events.
“We don’t want Donald Trump in Arizona, we don’t want his hatred,” one protester told Rascon.
SOURCE: http://www.huffingtonpost.com
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