Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has recently demeaned Haitians and Puerto Ricans — and now many Nicaraguans say Trump supporters on social media are aiming degrading rhetoric at them, too, in a bid to drum up support for the former president’s plan to deport millions of migrants.
In recent days, South Florida Nicaraguans have seen a derogatory meme on platforms like WhatsApp. It shows a dog representing Nicaraguan paroleros — migrants who’ve come legally to the U.S. on a humanitarian parole program the Biden Administration started in 2022.
The dog growls when asked about former President and Republican nominee Trump — who wants to end the parole and deport the hundreds of thousands of migrants from Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba and Haiti who’ve so far benefited from it.
But the dog smiles when asked about Nicaragua’s brutal leftist dictator Daniel Ortega.
The meme’s goal is to spread a lie that recently arrived Nicaraguan immigrants are in reality Ortega allies and agents infiltrating the U.S. — and therefore deserving of the mass deportation Trump has pledged.
“This message is really nasty,” said Ena Huete, who heads the exile nonprofit Nicaragüenes Libres, or Free Nicaraguans.
“It offends all Nicaraguans, because Nicaraguan people are coming here running from that Ortega repression.”
READ MORE: Trump pledges to remove thousands of legal migrants under Biden program
“It’s a psychological distortion, a complete denial of reality,” said Nicaraguan exile activist Francisco Larios, a Miami-Dade College economics professor who directs the online magazine Revista Abril.
“It’s a MAGA [pro-Trump] attempt to construct a justification for hateful deportations of Nicaraguan compatriots.”
Larios said it’s still unclear who created the meme.
But he, like Huete and other Nicaraguan community leaders WLRN contacted, said he’s certain it was produced by MAGA Nicaraguans — more conservative and established Nicaraguan immigrants known by as MAGAnicas — who are part of the Latino voter cohort that backs Trump and his insistence that the U.S. has lost control of its southern border.
(The Biden Administration created the parole program, which allows migrants to stay in the U.S. for two years and receive work permits, to dissuade migrants from crossing the overwhelmed border.)
“Whatever their belief, it doesn’t excuse this kind of fanaticism, this phenomenon of lying insults we’re seeing so often from Trump supporters in this election,” Larios said.
During his September debate with his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump loudly asserted the lie that Haitian migrants in Ohio — many of whom are also in the U.S. on the humanitarian parole because of gang violence back in Haiti — were killing and eating residents’ pets.
Last week, speakers used vile rhetoric to demean Puerto Ricans and Latinos at a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden in New York — calling Puerto Island “a floating island of garbage.”
Larios says after the dog meme began appearing in recent days, he began receiving messages from MAGAnicas labeling Nicaraguan paroleros as “delinquents.”
The established-versus-new immigrants clash is evident in other Latino communities such as the Venezuelan diaspora, which has its largest presence in South Florida.
Many Venezuelans who arrived in the U.S. in the 20th century or earlier in the 21st are now Trump supporters, known as MAGAzuelansand often scorn Venezuelan newcomers — whom they often brand, as Trump has done, as criminals.
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Publish date : 2024-11-04 10:17:00
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Author : theamericannews
Publish date : 2024-11-04 23:19:54
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