Los Angeles Times
By Kate Linthicum
September 14, 2015
A
few weeks after Donald Trump launched his campaign for the presidency, a
friend asked Ricardo Aca a question: "How would you feel about making a
short documentary and
risking your job?"
Aca,
24, had come to the U.S. from Mexico when he was 14. Now he lived in
Brooklyn and worked as a busboy at an upscale sushi restaurant on the
ground floor of the Trump
SoHo condo tower.
Aca
was angry about Trump's pronouncements that Mexico was sending rapists
and criminals to the U.S. An aspiring photographer, he had recently
started taking pictures
of fellow immigrants holding signs that said, "I am not a rapist" and
"I am not a criminal."
Trump
keeps pointing out these immigrants that have done these terrible
things.... That's not what we're like. It doesn't make me proud to go to
work every day under his
name.
- Ricardo Aca
He
said yes to the friend who asked to film him, and they got to work on a
short video with a provocative title: "Meet the Undocumented Immigrant
Who Works in a Trump
Hotel."
In
a testimony to the fascination with all things Trump in the 2016
presidential race, the video has been viewed more than 1.5 million
times. Aca, who has always been
more interested in cameras than politics, has found himself on the
front lines of the immigration debate.
He
has been flooded with emails and hounded by journalists, with
Spanish-language news crews even descending on his family home in
Mexico. He has been stopped on the subway
by other immigrants who praise his bravery for standing up to a
billionaire bully and criticized by thousands of YouTube commenters as a
criminal who should be deported.
"It's
been pretty crazy," Aca said last week. He was having tacos with a
friend, Hugo Segura, outside a Mexican restaurant in Bushwick, the
neighborhood where Aca grew
up. The pair once worked together at a Manhattan nightclub but had
fallen out of touch. When Segura, 29, saw Aca's video, he reached out.
"I'm
so used to people discriminating against Mexicans," Segura said to Aca.
But something about Trump's comments hit a nerve, he said. "The way he
said it, just standing
there saying it, it just fueled me. I was just so upset. I mean, why do
you have to go so far to try to get recognition?"
"Yeah,
at first we thought it was just, like, entertainment," Aca said. "You
laugh. And then a few weeks go by and you start to see that he's up
there in the polls and
people are supporting him and it just kind of becomes really scary.
Because you find out that there are people out there who feel this way."
The
video was directed by Chase Whiteside, a young filmmaker with a
left-leaning bent who has gained a sizable Internet following for his
short films documenting tea party
gatherings. In the video, Aca is seen taking photographs of immigrants
at a soccer game and making his long subway commute to Koi, the sushi
restaurant at Trump SoHo. Aca works two other jobs — as a food runner at
another restaurant and as an assistant in
the photo studio at La Guardia Community College, his alma mater.
"Trump
keeps pointing out these immigrants that have done these terrible
things," Aca says in the video. "But those are not the immigrants I
know. That's not what we're
like. It doesn't make me proud to go to work every day under his name."
Aca was 14 when he crossed the Arizona border with his sister to join their mother in New York.
In
2012, he received a temporary work permit and protection from
deportation under President Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which was available
to certain immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.
Some
Trump supporters have criticized Aca for misrepresenting his
immigration status in the video. They also point out that Koi leases
space at the condo tower and is
not owned by Trump.
Aca
says that even though he has a work permit, he still considers himself
undocumented because the work permit program could be terminated by the
next president. "Trump
has said he wants to end this program," Aca said.
Trump's
plan to curb illegal immigration includes proposals to ramp up
deportations, build a massive border fence and end automatic citizenship
for children born to immigrants
in the country illegally. "They have to go," Trump has repeatedly said.
The Republican front-runner was asked about Aca after the video came out.
"He's
got a legal work permit. I've heard he does a good job," Trump told
journalists. "We thought he was an illegal immigrant at first."
Although
multiple people have angrily called Koi's managers to say they should
hire only native-born workers, Aca hasn't been fired. He's glad for
that, but says he isn't
going to let up on Trump. He has been invited to speak about his
advocacy by immigrant activists, and he hopes to publish his photos of
immigrants in a book.
"It's like, 'OK, I still have my job,'" Aca said. "But you still want to deport me and 11 million other immigrants."
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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