Activists have assembled outside the headquarters of NBC at the Rockefeller Center in New York in order to protest the scheduled appearance of Donald Trump on ‘Saturday Night Live’, and have vowed to pressurise the show’s advertisers into withdrawing their support for the show.

Trump, the controversial presidential candidate and the current frontrunner in the race for the Republican Party’s nomination, is due to host ‘SNL’ on Saturday November 7th. This is despite the network’s parent company NBCUniversal severing its business ties with the candidate several months ago after Trump described Mexican immigrants as “bringing crime [and] drugs” to America.

Donald TrumpDonald Trump is due to host 'SNL' on November 7th.

Approximately two dozen protestors delivered a petition bearing more than half a million signatures asking NBCUniversal to replace Trump with another guest host in time for Saturday night’s show, and handed similarly worded letters to ‘SNL’s exec producer Lorne Michaels and the network’s president Steve Burke.

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Juan Escalante, the organiser of the rally and a representative of immigration reform group America’s Voice, said that the demonstration was to highlight the increased instances of violence against Latinos across America in the wake of Trump’s rhetoric about immigration.

The billionaire’s comment at the start of his campaign that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best” was just the start of a series of inflammatory remarks.

“[Latinos] do not want to see Trump’s racism or his anti-immigration message being satirized,” Escalante told The Huffington Post. “There’s nothing funny about mass deportation. There’s nothing funny about separating families. There’s nothing funny about calling Mexicans ‘rapists’ and murderers… It’s a very poor show of judgement and it’s completely disrespectful to Latinos and viewers across the nation.”

Neither NBC nor Trump’s representatives have commented on the protest..

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