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In late January 2018, reports surfaced that supporters of Donald Trump confronted a Native American legislator during an anti-immigration protest at the Arizona state capitol, demanding to know whether he was in the country legally. The viral stories on various web sites (including The Hill and the liberal RawStory.com) were all aggregated from the original reporting of the Arizona Capitol Times, a nonpartisan weekly newspaper focused on Arizona government and state politics. We confirmed that one of the anti-immigration protesters did indeed ask an indigenous state representative whether or not he was legal, both through video footage of the incident and three corroborating interviews with Arizona state legislators who witnessed the scene. In the background of the following video, a protester asks Rep. Eric Descheenie whether he is legal. Descheenie is Navajo. Rep. Pamela Powers Hannley filmed the exchange: The incident occurred during a chaotic, five-hour long demonstration on 25 January 2018 at the Arizona capitol building where roughly a dozen anti-immigration activists turned out to protest the social justice lobbying group Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA) — though the group was there to advocate for pro-labor legislation, not immigration. Protesters alleged that LUCHA was trying to advance social, racial and economic justice for DACA recipients, illegal aliens and their illegal families. According to state lawmakers who were at the scene, the protesters were visibly armed. Several state lawmakers and staff reported that the protesters singled out non-white people and accused them of being in the country illegally. We contacted protester Jennifer Caminiti-Harrison, who appears in the foreground of the video above, for comment. She told us on 1 February 2018 that a media representative was handling her communications, but no representative has responded to our query: As of 5 February 2018, no communication from Caminiti-Harrison addressing the incidents seen in the videos has been received. Though Caminiti-Harrison did not appear to notice the incident as it played out behind her in the video, she denied the allegations in an interview with the Capitol Times: Aside from the incident with Descheenie, a 14-minute video linked by the Capitol Times appears to corroborate complaints that protesters targeted nonwhite people. In it, demonstrators can be following people and yelling at them, demanding to know their stance on immigration. At one point a woman holding a camera approaches and starts filming a group of young men who are talking amongst themselves and appear to be doing their best to ignore her. She yells: Descheenie told us he was walking out of the capitol for lunch at a nearby farmer's market with fellow Arizona state lawmaker Rep. Wenona Benally (D-Window Rock) when he saw protesters hounding a group of children and Hannley. In a phone interview, Descheenie told us: Hannley told us she also encountered the protesters when she was going to the farmer's market for lunch and saw them yelling at a group of children. When she tried to intervene, they surrounded her: Rep. Hannley provided a second video showing the group yelling at schoolchildren as a man yells at them to get away from those children: Benally told us that even after the three legislators ended the conversation and broke away from the confrontation with the help of a capitol security guard, the protesters continued to follow them and yell at them. The encounter was so hostile that Benally said a security guard told the legislators take the back entrance when they returned to the capitol building from lunch.
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