“When Mexico sends its people, they are not sending their best,” Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump said during his campaign kick-off speech in June. “They are sending people that have lots of problems, and they are bringing those problems to us.”
One of those people is Ricardo Aca, an undocumented immigrant from Puebla who came to the United States with his family a decade ago when has just 14 years old. “We came to America because we wanted a better life,” Aca said in an interview with New Left Media. He came of age in Brooklyn, a place he says he loves. “This is where I went to high school. This is where all of my friends are. It’s home to me.”
Aca currently works as a busser in the Trump Soho building’s restaurant, a position he’s held for the last two years. He also works two other jobs on the side to make ends meet.
“I know I could lose my job just for talking about Trump,” Aca acknowledged. But after Trump continued to base his presidential campaign on anti-immigrant rhetoric, he could no longer maintain his silence. “It doesn’t make me proud to go to work every day under his name.”
“I’m not a criminal,” Aca said in the video. “I work really hard and I definitely don’t take it for granted.”
While Aca noted that some GOPers had criticized Trump’s comments about Mexicans, “to me they all seem to have the same position on immigration.” Indeed, led in part by Trump’s hardline on immigration, a plurality of GOP presidential hopefuls now want to end birthright citizenship. Nearly every contender opposes a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already in the country, including former supporters like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. And all have roundly criticized President Obama’s deportation relief for those immigrants who were brought to the United States when they were children.
Aca isn’t the only Latino to take umbrage at Trump’s prejudiced description of immigrants. A Washington Post article in July interviewed over a dozen Latino construction workers helping to build Trump’s new Washington D.C. hotel. “Do you think that when we’re hanging out there from the eighth floor that we’re raping or selling drugs?” a Salvadoran immigrant, Ramon Alvarez, said. “We’re risking our lives and our health.”
Even as Trump leads the polls for the Republican presidential nomination, his standing among Latinos has cratered. According to a poll this month, three-quarters of Latinos now have a negative view of the New York businessman. Just 13 percent have a favorable view.
On Sunday, Trump released his immigration white paper, including a call for widespread deportation of immigrant families and a massive wall on our southern border paid for, somehow, by Mexico. His plan also recommends national implementation of e-verify, a tool that tries to prevent companies, like Trump’s, from employing undocumented immigrants.
