AST Digital Magazine July 2017 Digital-July | Page 4

Volume 14
July 2017 Edition
For Grieving Parents, Trump Is ‘Speaking for
the Dead’ on Immigration
By Vivian Yee, The New York Times
This week, the House of Representatives plans to vote on a
bill that would intensify penalties for immigrants who re-enter
the United States after being deported. The bill is named for a
woman fatally shot by a man who illegally crossed the border
at least five times.
The families could reel off all the times they
had called the media and written to Wash-
ington, but after all that trying, they had
never heard anyone who mattered say any-
thing like it: Most Mexican immigrants, Don-
ald J. Trump declared in his first campaign
speech, were “rapists” who were “bringing
drugs, bringing crime” across the border.
had been told only that they were going to meet
with Mr. Trump. But then the group was ushered
into the next room, where the campaign had in-
vited reporters to a news conference.
It was a surprise, but no one seemed to mind.
Several stepped up to endorse Mr. Trump.
“He’s speaking for the dead,” said Jamiel Shaw
Sr., whose teenage son was shot to death by
a gang member in Los Angeles in 2008. “He’s
speaking for my son.”
Now he had come to meet them, the families of
people killed by undocumented immigrants, and
they wanted to tell him he was right.
One son had been struck by a truck, another shot
just around the corner from home.
Different causes of death, but the driver, the gun-
man, all the perpetrators were the same, the par-
ents said: people who never should have been in
the country in the first place.
Sitting alone with them at the Beverly Wilshire
Hotel in July 2015, the candidate distributed hugs
as the families wept.
When the campaign had called, most of them
(At 8:40pm on Sunday, March 2, 2008, Jamiel Shaw, Jr. was
brutally murdered by an illegal immigrant gang member who
had been released from jail only the night before. Police say
that Pedro Espinoza, a violent career criminal, executed
Shaw as he walked home because he was black. Courtesy of
Crowdifornia and YouTube. Posted on Dec 4, 2009)
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