A group of military veterans have bolstered the ranks of protesters in Portland, Oregon by creating a “Wall of Vets.”
The demonstrators told New York Times’ Mike Baker that they were there to ensure federal law enforcement officers didn’t infringe on the rights of other protesters.
“Our veterans are here specifically to support the rights of the protesters to protest,” Duston Obermeyer, a Marine Corps veteran, said in one of more than a dozen videos that Baker posted to Twitter on Saturday.
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Protesters in Portland previously banded together to create a Wall of Moms and a Wall of Dads, respectively, to stand between federal law enforcement agents and fellow demonstrators.
The Wall of Vets, which formed near the city’s federal courthouse, comes just a week after a video showing Navy veteran Christopher James David went viral.
In the video, David can be seen casually shrugging off baton blows and pepper spray before walking away and flipping federal agents off.
Related: Stop what you’re doing and watch this interview with the badass Navy vet who went viral in Portland
In a subsequent interview with ABC News, David said he wanted to use his “15 minutes to refocus the whole discussion back to Black Lives Matter as opposed to an old white guy who get beat up because I don’t think I’m worth the attention, to be perfectly frank.”
The protests against racial inequality, which have continued across the country sine May, have gained national attention in Portland largely due to the federal government’s response to demonstrators and the deployment of federal agents dressed in military-style clothing.
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Local officials have called for federal law enforcement personnel to be recalled from the city and accused the feds of inflaming tensions, while others have criticized the decision to deploy federal agents with military gear and equipment.
“When people who have served in the military for a long time have to look very hard at the photos and video from Portland and places like that to tell who these individuals [federal agents] are, then the average citizen is going to easily confuse what they see as a militarized response rather than a law enforcement one,” retired Marine Col. David Lapan, a former spokesman for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently told Task & Purpose’s Jeff Schogol.
Related: How dressing federal law enforcement agents like US troops undermines democracy