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Pennsylvania: anger among Puerto Ricans in key swing state after racist remarks
On Sunday evening, the Philadelphia council member Quetcy Lozada was attending a campaign event with Vice-President Kamala Harris at a local restaurant, as the Democratic presidential candidate unveiled a new economic proposal for Puerto Rico.
Lozada is of Puerto Rican descent and represents the seventh city council district in Philadelphia, made up of over 50% Latino, predominantly Puerto Rican, residents.
As Lozada left the campaign event, her phone began blowing up. Contacts began sending her texts with the video of racist remarks by a comedian, during a Trump rally in New York.
“I got in the car, I looked at the video, and I had to play it multiple times in order to make sure that I was hearing what I was actually hearing,” Lozada said in an interview. “I was absolutely frustrated, I was angry – but I was not surprised.”
As the Harris campaign was announcing her policy proposals for Puerto Rico, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe was opening for a Trump campaign rally in New York. Hinchcliffe, during his introduction, made racist and disparaging remarks about Puerto Ricans.
“There’s a lot going on. I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” said Hinchcliffe, a comedian and host of the popular podcast and stand up comedy show Kill Tony.
The racist comments spread like wildfire, leading to anger and indignation in Pennsylvania, one of the most important battleground states in the US election which many experts think is crucial to any attempt to win the White House. There are over 472,000 Puerto Ricans in the state of Pennsylvania, according to the US census bureau.
A Puerto Rican voter, Yemele Ayala, who was also at the Harris campaign event in Philadelphia, found Hinchcliffe’s comments disturbing.
“We should take this at face value – people’s behavior does tell the truth about themselves,” Ayala said. “And this is not the first time that our Puerto Rican community feels disrespected.”
As Ayala, a Harris supporter, watched the video of the racist remarks, her first thoughts were: “We still have more work to do.”
The backlash against the racist comments has led to Democratic party leaders to denounce the Trump campaign, seizing the opportunity to mobilize voters among Latino communities. On Monday morning, Lozada joined the Harris campaign in a press conference, denouncing the racist comments.
The Guardian spoke with Puerto Rican community leaders and voters, who have expressed anger at the racism and who hope will motivate people to vote for Harris in the crucial state.
Lozada said the racist comments were representative of the Trump campaign’s outlook on immigrant communities “Today, the Puerto Ricans are the topic of conversation. Not long ago, it was Venezuelans, it was Mexicans – it’s immigrants in general.”
During the Trump rally, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Tim Walz, and New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez live-streamed their reaction to the racist comments.
“Who is that jackwad?” Walz asked, then adding: “There are hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans across, in battleground states, that we need to send them a message: you’ve gotta vote.”
In response, the comedian, Hinchcliffe, published a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, saying that the Democratic party has “no sense of humor”.
“I love Puerto Rico and vacation there,” the comedian added. “I made fun of everyone … watch the whole set. I’m a comedian Tim … might be time to change your tampon.”
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The Trump campaign, on their end, attempted to distance itself from Hinchcliffe’s comments. “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” a Trump campaign adviser said in a statement to Fox News. Other Republicans also attempted to distance themselves from racist remarks, including the Florida senator Rick Scott.
Puerto Ricans on the island, despite being US citizens, are not eligible to vote. However, those based in US states are able to vote.
After the Spanish-American War, Puerto Rico became a US territory. In 1917, Puerto Ricans became US citizens. But because of the island’s status, Puerto Ricans on the island do not pay federal income tax and do not have political representation in Congress, aside from a non-voting representative.
In 2006, a major recession hit the island. The Puerto Rican government borrowed so much money to combat the economic problems that it led to a tremendous debt crisis. In 2016, Congress passed the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act, which established a financial oversight board known as “La Junta”, in order to manage the island’s budget to pay back Puerto Rico’s creditors. The financial oversight board has put in place austerity and privatization programs to incentivize investors to flock to Puerto Rico.
On Sunday, the Harris campaign announced a new economic plan for Puerto Rico. If elected, Harris promised, will push forward an “Opportunity Economy” for the island.
“Working with the private sector, the Puerto Rican government, municipalities, and other stakeholders, they will fight to strengthen the energy grid, make Puerto Rico a hub for industries of the future, and uplift the island’s role as a vibrant economic and cultural center,” the Harris campaign said in a fact sheet published on the campaign’s website.
During the Trump administration, events in Puerto Rico placed the island in further turmoil. In 2017, a catastrophic hurricane struck the island, leading to deaths and tremendous devastation in Puerto Rico. After Hurricane Maria, Trump considered the idea of selling Puerto Rico. Later, a report found that the Trump administration delayed over $20bn in hurricane relief aid to the island following the hurricane. And during a visit to Puerto Rico, Trump faced backlash when he tossed paper towels at a crowd in need of supplies.
“Giving this person an opportunity to lead our country could be disastrous,” Lozada said. “At the end of the day, they have just helped us – they have helped the Democratic party for where we will be on Nov 5, with this last incident.”
Ayala, the Puerto Rican voter , agreed. The racist remarks from Sunday night, Ayala said, underestimated “the power we have, in numbers, in this country.
“America and the current state of this country has been built on the sweat, blood and shoulders of our community,” Ayala added. “We’re not taking that lightly.”
Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, the Food and Drug Administration’s top drug regulator, said she was fired from the agency Friday after she declined to resign.
She said she did not know who had ordered her firing or why, nor whether Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. knew of her fate. The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The departure reflected the upheaval at the F.D.A., days after the resignation of Dr. Marty Makary, the agency commissioner. Dr. Makary had become a lightning rod for critics of the agency’s decisions to reject applications for rare disease drugs and to delay a report meant to supply damaging evidence about the abortion drug mifepristone. He also spent months before his departure pushing back on the White House’s requests for him to approve more flavored vapes, the reason he ultimately cited for leaving.
Dr. Hoeg’s hiring had startled public health leaders who were familiar with her track record as a vaccine skeptic, and she played a leading role in some of the agency’s most divisive efforts during her tenure. She worked on a report that purportedly linked the deaths of children and young adults to Covid vaccines, a dossier the agency has not released publicly. She was also the co-author of a document describing Mr. Kennedy’s decision to pare the recommendations for 17 childhood vaccines down to 11.
But in an interview on Friday, Dr. Hoeg said she “stuck with the science.”
“I am incredibly proud of the work we were doing,” Dr. Hoeg said, adding, “I’m glad that we didn’t give in to any pressures to approve drugs when it wasn’t appropriate.”
As the director of the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, she was a political appointee in a role that had been previously occupied by career officials. An epidemiologist who was trained in the United States and Denmark, she worked on efforts to analyze drug safety and on a panel to discuss the use of serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants, during pregnancy. She also worked on efforts to reduce animal testing and was the agency’s liaison to an influential vaccine committee.
She made sure that her teams approved drugs only when the risk-benefit balance was favorable, she said.
The firing worsens the leadership vacuum at the F.D.A. and other agencies, with temporary leaders filling the role of commissioner, food chief and the head of the biologics center, which oversees vaccines and gene therapies. The roles of surgeon general and director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are also unfilled.
The U.S. Supreme Court
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The U.S. Supreme Court refused Friday to allow Virginia to use a new congressional map that favored Democrats in all but one of the state’s U.S. House seats. The map was a key part of Democrats’ effort to counter the Republican redistricting wave set off by President Trump.
The new map was drawn by Democrats and approved by Virginia voters in an April referendum. But on May 8, the Supreme Court of Virginia in a 4-to-3 vote declared the referendum, and by extension the new map, null and void because lawmakers failed to follow the proper procedures to get the issue on the ballot, violating the state constitution.
Virginia Democrats and the state’s attorney general then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking to put into effect the map approved by the voters, which yields four more likely Democratic congressional seats. In their emergency application, they argued the Virginia Supreme Court was “deeply mistaken” in its decision on “critical issues of federal law with profound practical importance to the Nation.” Further, they asserted the decision “overrode the will of the people” by ordering Virginia to “conduct its election with the congressional districts that the people rejected.”
Republican legislators countered that it would be improper for the U.S. Supreme Court to wade into a purely state law controversy — especially since the Democrats had not raised any federal claims in the lower court.
Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Republicans without explanation leaving in place the state court ruling that voided the Democratic-friendly maps.
The court’s decision not to intervene was its latest in emergency requests for intervention on redistricting issues. In December, the high court OK’d Texas using a gerrymandered map that could help the GOP win five more seats in the U.S. House. In February, the court allowed California to use a voter-approved, Democratic-friendly map, adopted to offset Texas’s map. Then in March, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the redrawing of a New York map expected to flip a Republican congressional district Democratic.
And perhaps most importantly, in April, the high court ruled that a Louisiana congressional map was a racial gerrymander and must be redrawn. That decision immediately set off a flurry of redistricting efforts, particularly in the South, where Republican legislators immediately began redrawing congressional maps to eliminate long established majority Black and Hispanic districts.
An explosion and fire drew a large emergency response on Friday to a lumber mill in the Midcoast region of Maine, officials said.
The State Police and fire marshal’s investigators responded to Robbins Lumber in Searsmont, about 72 miles northeast of Portland, said Shannon Moss, a spokeswoman for the Maine Department of Public Safety.
Mike Larrivee, the director of the Waldo County Regional Communications Center, said the number of victims was unknown, cautioning that “the information we’re getting from the scene is very vague.”
“We’ve sent every resource in the county to that area, plus surrounding counties,” he said.
Footage from the scene shared by WABI-TV showed flames burning through the roof of a large structure as heavy, dark smoke billowed skyward.
The Associated Press reported that at least five people were injured, and that county officials were considering the incident a “mass casualty event.”
Catherine Robbins-Halsted, an owner and vice president at Robbins Lumber, told reporters at the scene that all of the company’s employees had been accounted for.
Gov. Janet T. Mills of Maine said on social media that she had been briefed on the situation and urged people to avoid the area.
“I ask Maine people to join me in keeping all those affected in their thoughts,” she said.
Representative Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, said on social media that he was aware of the fire and explosion.
“As my team and I seek out more information, I am praying for the safety and well-being of first responders and everyone else on-site,” he said.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
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