Pro-Trump graffiti to ‘Build the Wall’ at UC San Diego Latino center spark outrage

Messages supporting Donald Trump and attacking Mexican immigrants were written in front of a Latino community center at UC San Diego, sparking outrage on campus.

The messages, some of which said “Build the wall,” “Deport them all,” and “Mexico will pay,” were written in chalk on a sidewalk close to the Raza Resource Centro.

According to the UCSD College Democrats Facebook page, the messages were written by three to five men wearing hooded sweatshirts on Friday, the night before the university’s annual Triton Day, when new students are welcomed to campus.

The group said its members were offended by the messages.

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Kevin Antonio Aguilar, a doctoral student in Latin American history at the university wrote on Facebook that the messages were an attack on the Latino community and come amid what he called “a continuing hostility towards communities of color on campus.”

“We in the Latin American community on campus demand that the individuals responsible for this racist attack face the proper repercussions for these actions,” he wrote.

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Aguilar said that if the people responsible for the messages were students that they should be punished.

“If it is found that these individuals are students, we request their immediate expulsion for inciting racist hostilities on campus in violation of UCSD ‘Principles of Community,’” wrote Aguilar. “We demand that the mental health of Latin and Black students be prioritized in the wake of persistent racist hostilities on campus.”

This is not the first controversial Trump incident on college campuses.

A Mexican American student at Scripps College in Claremont woke up to “#trump2016” scrawled on the whiteboard outside her dorm room. The student body president called it a “racist act.”

On the campus of Emory University in Atlanta, students protested when someone wrote in chalk: “Accept the Inevitable: Trump 2016.”

Baker writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.

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