Founder of Jews for Hitler Shocked by Concentration Camps
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What do you even say about a person like this?
The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown over the last year has gone from uncomfortable to untenable for Ileana Garcia, a Republican state senator in Florida.
A Transportation Security Administration officer at the Tallahassee airport overheard her speaking Spanish and asked whether Ms. Garcia, who was born in Miami, was an American citizen. She worried for the first time that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents might stop her son, a young adult, because he looks Hispanic. Constituents have asked her for help finding immigrant relatives arrested by ICE.
Ms. Garcia, 56, has had enough. The Republican Party is in trouble, she said in an interview, predicting that it will lose this year’s midterm elections if the White House does not soon reconsider its harsh immigration enforcement tactics.
“We should not be afraid as a party to speak up, to course correct,” she said. That was before Saturday, when Border Patrol agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old I.C.U. nurse who was protesting in Minneapolis, and federal officials sought to portray him as a “domestic terrorist.” Ms. Garcia said she was “dumbfounded.”
“It’s gone too far,” she said. “What happened Saturday was abhorrent.”
What a little-known state senator in a state that no longer appears to be a political battleground thinks might seem of little consequence. But Ms. Garcia, who is Cuban American, was once such a true believer in President Trump that she went all-in on his 2016 campaign, leaving her career in Spanish-language media to co-found “Latinas for Trump,” a national organization that drew attention at the time.
She then moved to Washington to work for Mr. Trump’s first administration, in the public affairs office of the Department of Homeland Security, which enforces immigration laws.