No one is hunting Hispanics

Last week, ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in the United States, conducted a series of searches for people who entered and remained illegally in the country. Most of these people had been apprehended, given their due process and, as part of this process, should have appeared in court at a later date; but they did not. Having collected information on thousands of illegal aliens, the US government prompted ICE to seek and detain individuals who had not appeared in court so that they could be expeditiously processed and deported. Along with these people, other illegal immigrants who were found in meat processing plants, for example, and who did not show proof of legal status were also apprehended. In total, some 700 people were detained. Later, authorities explained that about half of them had been released on humanitarian grounds. Not too long after the news about the raids was announced, mainstream media and fake liberals were screaming on national television because according to them, the US government was hunting down Hispanics. International media called the raids “the largest in 10 years” as Democrats denounced Donald Trump as a white supremacist, racist person for attempting to enforce existing immigration laws. Soon, propaganda outlets like CNN and MSNBC began adding drama to the issue by showing sad faces, children crying and relatives of those detained clamoring for freedom for their brothers and sisters. What began as an operation to detain illegal aliens, regardless of their nationality, soon was turned into a racist operation against Mexicans. The media quickly emphasized that 107 of those detained were Mexican nationals and that there was a connection between the raids and the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, where a lunatic had attacked disarmed citizens claiming that there was a Hispanic invasion of the country. ICE’s operation was very specific. It targeted processing plants where illegal aliens worked under an irregular status. The raids took place in small towns near Jackson, which has a workforce composed mainly of Latino illegal immigrants. The cities affected included Bay Springs, Carthage, Canton, Morton, Pelahatchie and Sebastapol. Among the facilities that were targeted by the operation is the Koch Foods plant, one of the largest producers of poultry in the United States. Detained workers filled three buses: two for men and one for women. Agents transferred them to a military hangar to be prosecuted for violating immigration laws. The detainees who could prove they had legal status were released. Marcelo Ebrard, Secretary of Foreign Affairs, reported Thursday that 107 of the detainees were Mexican. In early July, Donald Trump announced massive raids in 10 major cities that would affect nearly 2,000 foreigners with deportation orders. Time went by but mass raids never occurred and Mississippi, the state where ICE began the raids last week, was not on the list of states where they would take place. More than 30 million irregular immigrants live in the US, according to the Pew Research research center. Two-thirds of them have been on US soil for more than a decade. According to a 2016 census, in the United States, over 38% of the population is non-white. That amounts to 126 million people. The rest, 62%, or 195 million people, are white. Although there are no official statistics as to how many of those 126 million non-white people are in the US illegally, mainstream media outlets want the public to believe that ICE was hunting Hispanics over any other group. Left-wing media echoed Democratic candidates’ talking points that Trump’s discourse was responsible for the shooting in El Paso because the alleged shooter said that there was a Latino invasion. However, they conveniently omitted that the Ohio gunman who also killed people just a few days apart from El Paso shooting called himself an Elizabeth Warren follower. The Hispanic population in the US reached 59.9 million people in 2018 and is responsible for 52% of the country’s total population growth in the last 10 years. Almost one in five Americans is Latino. The media have played a decisive role in the process of labeling Donald Trump and his followers as racist or white supremacists. While Trump has tirelessly said that it is against illegal immigration and that it favors legal and orderly immigration, every time an attack on any group of immigrants occurs, the media blames those attacks on Trump. “It was a hate crime against Hispanics, regardless of whether they were migrants or not,” says Elizabeth Vaquera, director of the Cisneros Institute for Hispanic Leadership at George Washington University. Liars’ opinions such as Vaquera’s perpetuate the perception that Trump is racist and opposes immigration. If we believe what Vaquera says, we would have to identify Hispanics themselves and other immigrant groups as racist, because they are also mostly against illegal and uncontrolled immigration promoted by the media and Democratic candidates in the US Congress. Neither Trump nor anyone in his administration has ever devalued the contribution that immigrants have to the US, as 126 million residents are immigrants themselves. It would be foolish to say that legal immigration does not have a positive outcome. All immigrant communities, including the Hispanic community paly an important role in the development of the US. “Unfortunately, many English media have failed in their duty to produce content that understands the cultural dynamics of the Hispanic community, and that is due to the lack of inclusion of Hispanics in the English […]