From Aaron Schlossberg threatening to call Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) on Spanish speakers to a Border Patrol agent holding two women because they weren’t chatting in English, we’ve seen many instances of discrimination toward Spanish speakers in 2018. And while we see how the internet comes through for the victims of bigotry, it doesn’t always happen in the moment, as someone hurls racist insults at them. But one incident in a Colorado grocery store showed what can happen when people stand up for those being harassed.
At City Market grocery store on Monday afternoon, Fabiola Velasquez and Isabel Marin – both originally from Mexico – chatted in Spanish when Linda Dwire confronted them. She asked them whether they lived in the US and even put her hand in one of the women’s faces. But as she told them to learn English, Kamira Trent stood up for them.
“I’m calling the cops,” Trent said. “You leave these women alone! Get out!”
Dwire then told her that she comes “from a generation that’s destroying this country.”
“No, I do not. I have respect. You do not harass people,” Trent replied.
“You will lose your country,” Dwire said. “You know what, you will lose this country.”
Unshaken by her words, Trent then said, “You do not harass Hispanic women!”
Trent not only used her privilege to call out Dwire, but she also called police. Police arrested Dwire and charged her with two counts of harassment. She was released on bond, but needs to show up in court in November.
When Trent stepped in, she was just trying to get Dwire to calm down, but it didn’t work. “She just angrier and angrier,” she told BuzzFeed News. “I was trying to get her away from the two women, but s he wasn’t going to leave them alone. What she said and the way she said it was wrong.”
In about a 10-minute span, they began yelling at each other. Trent called the police, something the Velasquez and Marin would not have done.
Velasquez shared the encounter on Facebook, with a message that read, “Thanks to another women (we didn’t know her) who defended us and called the police, I think they arrested the woman who was attacking us. I’ve always seen these videos on social media and they filled me with rage, and today, that it happened to me, I want to say that I felt very helpless.”
Check out the video below.
