HISPANICS/ICE/RACISM/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “It was supposed to be a White House salute to the heroism of immigration agents who put their lives on the line to protect Americans. But on Monday [8-20-18], President Trump appeared to have something else on his mind: the ethnicity of one of the men he was honoring. ‘Speaks perfect English,’ Mr. Trump blurted out as he encouraged Adrian Anzaldua, a Hispanic-American Border Patrol agent and dog handler from Texas, to join him onstage in the East Room. Mr. Anzaldua recently arrested a smuggler in Laredo who had tried to bring 78 people into the United States illegally inside a truck trailer…If Mr. Anzaldua was offended, he did not show it. He smiled and strode to the lectern, then offered a brief account of how he received an alert about the truck, ‘ran the dog’ to search it, then opened the latch to reveal “a lot of subjects.’ The episode was the latest example of the president making a racially tinged remark in public, this time during an event devised to spotlight his tough immigration agenda. It came only days after a former aide, Omarosa Manigault Newman, claimed in a tell-all book that Mr. Trump had been caught on tape using a racial slur to refer to African-Americans, a charge that he has denied but that his press secretary did not flatly rule out.”
–Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “Trump Says Hispanic-American Border Patrol Agent ‘Speaks Perfect English’,” The New York Times online, August 21, 2018