Immigration activists interrupted one of Senator Kay Hagan’s campaign events by joining the North Carolina Democrat on stage unexpectedly to protest her immigration record.
“Friends don’t deport friends,” one protester’s sign said, as an activist called the Senator “anti-immigrant.”
Hagan tried to mollify the activists, but it didn’t work. “I supported commonsense, bipartisan immigration reform,” she insisted.
The vulnerable senator most recently frustrated activists in September, when she cast a procedural vote against President Obama’s executive amnesty, despite supporting the policy earlier in the summer.
Hagan, like almost all the other Democrats who voted for the Republican measure, held off casting her vote for it until after it was clear the measure would fail. “Before she voted, Hagan was seen talking to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), and then huddled off the floor with Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee,” Politico reported.
The activists aren’t very forgiving of such election-year maneuvering. “We wanted to make clear she is not our friend,” Viridiana Martinez, one of the activists at the event, told BuzzFeed.