Analysis: A well-meaning desire to erase the shooter and his hateful ideology has instead erased the victims and their community
Adrian Carrasquillo is a national political reporter covering 2020 and Latino issues who has written for NBC News,As a reporter, I’ve talked to immigration activists for the better part of a decade. They don’t often cry, at least not in front of me.
But the media’s desire to erase the shooter and his ideology ended up erasing his victims and their community, too. While the news media successfully portrayed this shooting as part of a national epidemic of mass killings, we failed to accurately convey how this one was different. The visceral emotions of the Latinos I spoke with should have been—and should still be—front and center.
“Now Hispanic Americans have been targeted, some who are immigrants, and all who have limited political power,” I wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. “That’s what’s going on. AndI received more than 160 private messages on Twitter along with some emails and texts from people who told me they didn’t have a safe space to share these stories.
A Dreamer in Texas told me he was terrified of taking his son to stores or crowded places, and said he warned his parents not to speak Spanish in public. A first-generation Salvadoran man with a wife who is white said they just had a baby boy four weeks ago. He said he has told her he hopes the baby doesn’t have dark skin.
And then the process started all over again. A massive Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid at seven food processing plants in Morton, Mississippi, led to the arrests of 680 undocumented workers, a record. Children cried outside the gates for their parents. Wives came to the scene to say goodbye to their husbands. It was a new method for separating families, but with the same result.
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