At a recent Trump campaign event held at Madison Square Garden, a comedian performing onstage drew widespread backlash after referring to Puerto Rico as “an island of garbage.”
The remark has stirred outrage among Puerto Ricans, including Raymond De Leon Perez, a Reno resident and registered Democrat who canvasses for local elections.
“This comedian made these comments this time going straight to Puerto Ricans, going straight to my island. As a Puerto Rican, I can tell you that I feel horrible, horrible. It made me feel bad for my kids, for my wife, for my family, for my Puerto Rican people,” said De Leon.
De Leon thinks that Trump is lying when he said that he didn’t know who the comedian was.
“I think you can tell that to a child and maybe he will believe it. Not just anyone goes up there without being investigated," he said in Spanish.
De Leon, who has already cast his vote for Harris, said those comments about the Puerto Rican community made him feel stronger about what he believes in.
“I am really upset and I can tell you that I am going to go door to door to get that vote for Kamala Harris,” said De Leon in Spanish.
National leaders also spoke out against Trump’s deportation plans highlighted during the same event.
During a virtual gathering of Latino leaders on Oct. 29, Janet Murguía, president of UnidosUS, the nation's largest Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization, condemned Trump's immigration plans, including a mass deportation plan on “Day 1.”
“We know that Trump's plans and proposals would rip apart nearly one in three Latino families, impacting not only undocumented individuals, but the millions of US citizens with close ties to them. Disrupting millions of Latino families and removing workers en masse would hit sectors from agriculture to healthcare and cause ripple effects across every community in this country by removing millions of workers from key industries,” Murguía said.
Sondra Cosgrove, history professor at the College of Southern Nevada and executive director of Vote Nevada, expressed concern that the negative tone of the current campaigns is alienating voters, especially non-partisan voters.
“With non partisan voters, I've heard from them over the last four years that they feel like both of the parties hate them, that if they don't want to join the party, then they just don't exist,” Cosgrove said.
As for the attacks, Cosgrove is not sure this strategy favors either side, but there's one thing she's sure of. “It's just for entertainment purposes. It just draws attention. It gets them on TV against them in the news, there's a lot of money in our politics right now. And so the more outrageous things are, the more outlandish, the more obnoxious based things that they say it gets, the more attention,” Cosgrove said.
The incident has underscored ongoing tensions as the campaign season intensifies with just five days until election day.
