
For Ashanty Bonilla, the damage began with the response to a single tweet she shared 10 months ago.
Unpopular opinion, Ashanty, then 16 and a sophomore at Lewiston High School in rural Idaho, wrote on April 9. People who support Trump and go to Mexico for vacation really piss me off. Sorry not sorry.
A schoolmate, who is white, took a screen shot of her tweet and posted it to Snapchat, along with a Confederate flag.
The next morning, as Ashanty arrived at school, half a dozen boys, including the one who had written the message, stood nearby.
Youre illegal. Go back to Mexico, she heard one of them say. F--- Mexicans.
Ashanty, shaken but silent, walked past as a friend yelled at the boys to shut up.
In a 33,000-person town that is 94 percent white, Ashanty, whose father is half-black and whose mother is Mexican American, had always worked to fit in. She attended every football game and won a school spirit award as a freshman. She straightened her hair and dyed it blond, hoping to look more like her friends.
She had known those boys whod heckled her since they were little. For her 15th birthday the year before, some had danced at her quinceañera.
A friend drove her off campus for lunch, but when they pulled back into the parking lot, Ashanty spotted people standing around her car. A rope had been tied from the back of the Honda Pilot to a pickup truck.
Republican Trump 2020, someone had written in the dust on her back window.
Hands trembling, Ashanty tried to untie the rope but couldnt. She heard the laughing, sensed the cellphone cameras pointed at her. She began to weep.
She seldom attended classes the last month of school. That summer, she started having migraines and panic attacks. In August, amid her spiraling despair, Ashanty swallowed 27 pills from a bottle of antidepressants. A helicopter rushed her to a hospital in Spokane, Wash., 100 miles away.