President Donald Trump is not getting an invitation to a George Lopez’ niece quinceañera anytime soon. The American comedian of Mexican descent, has taken to social media to attack the President’s unorthodox immigration policies, that have caused so much harm not only to our undocumented brothers, but to too many American families that have been ripped apart by the President’s onslaught attack on Latin culture.
“The Trump administration is deporting Latinos to make the streets safer … you wanna make the streets safer, deport the police!” Lopez’ Instagram photo read. “This is not an indictment of all Law Enforcement , some still just beat you” read the caption of his crazy Instagram post.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BWQ10QMhREU/
The comment section became a real hotbed of uneducated discussion, with open-border advocates clashing against Trump’s #MAGA gang and police apologists, racial slurs were thrown around in such a nonchalant fashion, that it shows just how normalized racism and anti-latino sentiments have become. A lot of people demanded for the comedian to go back to Mexico, as if protesting racism was in some way the same as protesting America.
To put into context the current administration’s sentiments towards the Latino community, one needs to go no further than the POTUS’ first 100 days in office, where the already massive deportation operations increased a further 38% and the arrests of undocumented immigrants with no criminal history doubled.
Lopez’s picture also touches one of America’s most high profile issues right now, and that is Police brutality, a subject that has many skeptics and naysayers, despite the countless filmed evidence of law enforcement one-sided violent encounters with people of color. According to the Washington Post, since 2016, fatal police shootings have increased in 50%, with many of these shootings having been caught on film and shared on social media, a practice that has made visible just how deep institutionalized discrimination goes.
According to PBS’ Newshour, Latinos made up 16% of all police-involved killings in 2016, a stat that has gone largely unnoticed because of the usual black vs white narrative that dominates the racial conflict of this country. “Americans don’t see any kind of historical context when Latinos are victims of state violence, despite the fact that there is historical context there,” said Aaron Fountain, a historian of youth activism at Indiana University, about the topic.
