Thousands rallied at a dozen protests in northern Arizona communities this weekend, part of national "No Kings" demonstrations against the Trump administration.
Organizers say they’re meant to "defend democracy and reject authoritarian power."
The rallies come as an immigration crackdown continues, with some supported by national guard deployments.
Organizers say 2,500 people lined more than a mile of State Route 69 in Prescott Valley Saturday morning.
Vietnam veteran Dick Derrickson and his wife came from Prescott.
He says he’s against the deployment of National Guard troops to cities like Chicago and Portland and worries it could lead to violence.
"I'm old enough to remember Kent State. That's a result that can happen when you put people on one side against each other and one side of them has loaded weapons," Derrickson says.
On the other side of the road about a dozen people rallied in support of the Trump administration.
In Flagstaff, more than five thousand people gathered on the lawn of city hall.
The crowd was notably younger.
Sofia Carrasco is a freshman at Northern Arizona University.
“A lot of my family is undocumented. Recently, some of them finally got their green card. Especially when ICE raids were here in Phoenix, Flagstaff — everywhere in Arizona — that terrified me. I did not want any of my family to go outside. I didn't want them to go to work. I didn't want to go to school because I was scared that maybe they would trap me and my siblings and try to get my family to come out, to take them away," Carrasco says.
Organizers say 1,600 people lined State Route 89A through west Sedona, along with several other demonstrations in Kingman, Payson, Tuba City and numerous other locations across northern Arizona.
Leading up to Saturday’s events, some Republican lawmakers called the more than 2,000 planned demonstrations nationwide "hate-America rallies."
That assertion was laughed away by one Prescott Valley woman dressed in an inflatable frog costume.
"Nobody is out here because they hate America. They're here because they love America, they want to see our constitution upheld, they want the rule of law to be upheld," she says.
