<img src="https://sb.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&amp;c2=36750692&amp;cv=3.6.0&amp;cj=1"> 'Her screams…': Horror as innocent Chilean tourist in New York snatched by NYPD, 12-year-old daughter left alone on streets – We Got This Covered
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‘Her screams…’: Horror as innocent Chilean tourist in New York snatched by NYPD, 12-year-old daughter left alone on streets

Reminder not to speak Spanish in public.

Under the Trump regime, tourism to the United States is cratering, but who can blame foreigners for staying away? There are invasive searches of your devices at border control, the prospect of being whisked away to an ICE detention camp if a border guard is having a bad day, and the general suspicion and loathing emanating from the istration to anyone who doesn’t look like they walked out of Leave it to Beaver.

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This extraordinarily unwelcoming atmosphere is exemplified by the NYPD’s treatment of Chilean tourist Javiera Montero. She flew to New York with plans to see the sights: enjoy Times Square, get the boat out to see the Statue of Liberty, maybe get some selfies at the top of the Empire State Building.

What she experienced instead was the sharp end of Trump’s police state. While walking through Times Square, Montero’s 12-year-old daughter was knocked to the ground, so she asked an NYPD officer for assistance. Instead of help, she was smashed to the ground, cuffed, and thrown in a cell. Meanwhile, her crying daughter was left abandoned on the streets of Manhattan.

A man took pity on the distraught girl and decided to help her out, doing his best to figure out where the cops had taken her mother. Fortunately, this good Samaritan was able to locate her, though on arrival at the police station, the distraught child was forbidden from using the WiFi to her father. Eight hours later, Montero was finally released, with the NYPD (who are actively collaborating with ICE) forced to it she’d committed no crime and was simply an innocent tourist.

Quotas must be filled

It’s worth underlining that the real reason Montero was arrested was simply because she has brown skin and was speaking Spanish. The Trump istration has set strict quotas for arresting anyone even suspected of being in the country illegally, with Stephen Miller ordering that 3,000 people be arrested every single day, or ICE officers will face consequences.

With that quota in place, is it any surprise that anyone with a Spanish accent on the streets of America is now in danger? Bear in mind that Miller’s quotas don’t mean those arrests need to translate into deportations, merely that people are being scooped up as individual officers desperately try to hit their targets or face retribution.

Montero is now back in Chile and is “completely mortified” at being arrested. Unable to it that innocent people are being attacked for the crime of having brown skin, MAGA liars are claiming that she’s a criminal, or had been in the country illegally for years.

The truth is she was simply a tourist seeing the sights of New York with her daughter, and officers profiled her as an easy arrest to fill their immigrant-hunting quota for the day. If you have darker skin, a foreign accent, or a Latin-sounding name, beware.


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David James
I'm a writer/editor who's been at the site since 2015. Love writing about video games and will crawl over broken glass to write about anything related to Hideo Kojima. But am happy to write about anything and everything, so long as it's interesting!