Wake Up, Boricuas, Wake Up Latinos — Former President’s Prejudice Makes No Distinctions

Maribel Hastings

If any doubt remains about what motivates the Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, witness the rally on Oct. 27^th at New York’s Madison Square Garden, where the speakers demonstrated that their prejudice extends beyond undocumented immigrants. What motivates them is their open racism against minorities and people of color — even if they are U.S. citizens, like Puerto Ricans.

The ‘comedian’ Tony Hinchcliffe declared that ‘there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.’ He also employed insensitive stereotypes about Latinas, Latinos, African Americans, Jewish people, and Palestinians. Other speakers, including Trump, insulted the Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris.

They are not hiding the fact that they would deport U.S. citizens.

On the Island, the incident unleashed criticisms toward the Trump campaign for making the rally a disgusting festival of extremism — although Trump called it a ‘love fest’ — and for distancing itself from the controversy, arguing that the ‘joke did not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.’

But it reflects it to perfection. Trump’s disdain and mistreatment of Puerto Rico is not new. His antipathy was evident in his forced visit to the Island after the devastating Hurricane Maria in 2017, when he threw paper towels at its victims.

His administration torpedoed the distribution of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funds for the response and reconstruction of Puerto Rico. It was in 2017 that he had asked if it were possible to sell Puerto Rico or exchange it for Greenland since the Island is a ‘dirty’ country of ‘poor’ people.

But on Tuesday, Trump said, ‘No one has done more for Puerto Rico than me.’

Puerto Rico has been a U.S. territory since 1898, and it received U.S. citizenship in 1917. Despite its small size, Puerto Ricans have shone globally in every arena. The percentage of Puerto Ricans in the Armed Forces is greater than their share of the U.S. population. They have fought in all of the wars and sacrificed their lives in the process. They have stood out in sports, arts, music, film, science, engineering, writing, beauty pageants, and politics — from the humblest who went to cut sugar cane in Hawaii under subhuman conditions at the beginning of the 20th century to those coming to Pennsylvania to pick tomatoes in the 1940s, to having a Justice of Puerto Rican descent on the country’s Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor.

Those who live on the Island have a half-citizenship that doesn’t allow them to vote to elect the president who controls their destinies. They have a voice in Congress but not a vote. However, the 6 million who live in the United States vote, and many of them are concentrated in competitive states that could define the outcome of the presidential election: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin. In some states, the number of Boricuas (Puerto Ricans) exceeds Joe Biden’s margin of victory in 2020.

In 2020, Biden beat Trump in Pennsylvania by almost 81,000 votes, and 472,213 Puerto Ricans live there. In Arizona, Biden beat Trump by 10,457 votes in 2020, and 64,738 reside there.

The question that this Boricua writer asks herself is whether Trump’s most recent offense will make Puerto Ricans support Harris, who was in Philadelphia on Oct. 27^th seeking support from Boricua voters and presenting her proposals for the Island’s economic development.

I ask myself this because many Puerto Ricans, like many Latinos, support Trump despite his open racism, citing ‘economic’ reasons.

They believe the extremism of Trump and his team won’t touch them because it is limited to undocumented people. They don’t realize that, for Trump and his allies, we are not and will never be ‘real Americans.’ His plan for mass deportations has the potential to affect all of us, undocumented people and citizens, whether for its use of racial profiling or for living in families with mixed immigration statuses.

The former acting director of ICE under Trump, Tom Homan, who is projected as the next director of the agency if Trump wins, coldly said on CBS’ ‘60 Minutes’ that the U.S. citizen children of undocumented people could be deported with their parents, and therefore avoid family separation.

They are not hiding the fact that they would deport U.S. citizens.

Forewarned is forearmed. And Trump’s prejudice is an open secret. Wake up, Boricuas. Wake up, Latinos. No one is exempt from Trump’s extremism.

Maribel Hastings is a Senior Advisor to América’s Voice.