https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/us/politics/trump-ice-immigration.html
‘Speaks Perfect English,’ Trump Says of Hispanic-American Border Patrol Agent
By Julie Hirschfeld Davis
Aug. 20, 2018
WASHINGTON — 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, 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.
“Come here. I want to ask you about that — 78 lives,” Mr. Trump said, putting Mr. Anzaldua on the spot. “You saved 78 people. So how did you feel, that there were people in that 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.”
“Fantastic job — what a good job he did,” Mr. Trump said, adding wryly, “Tomorrow he will be announcing that he’s running for office.”
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.
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