The other day I wrote about a gay Latino was assaulted here in NYC and after going to the police found himself facing criminal charges and deportation. Ricardo Muñiz’s mother spoke at a press conference in front of the Brooklyn Supreme Court.
The video, from Univision is in Spanish pero I will translate after.

Mala’s translation:
Anchorwoman: A Latina mother says that her son was savagely beaten for being gay and that when he went to press charges, he was the one that ended up behind bars and now could be deported. From New York, Natalia Cruz gives us more details on this case.

Natalia Cruz: With tears, this Mexican mother begs for her son not to be deported.

Jorgelina Aguirre: My son is unjustly in jail, just because he is homosexual. They took all these things to use against him.

Natalia Cruz : The mother says that her son, 23 year old Ricardo Muñiz, went to press charges saying that he had been savagely beaten for being homosexual. The police, allegedly according to Muñiz’s mother, painted Ricardo as the villain.

Jorgeline Aguirre: We came from my country because they would attack him. They discriminated against him. They would beat him. It was never like this though.

Natalia Cruz : Muñiz told the police that last July 18th, he was dancing with a friend in an area bar and there two men starting screaming anti-gay insults at them. When Muñiz walked out on the street with two friends, the alleged aggressors intercepted them with their car.

Karina Claudio from Make the Road NY [full disclosure, I know Karina]: The men got out of the car and started to insult Muñiz and his friends again.

Natalia Cruz: According to Muñiz, he was attacked with fists, a bat, and a belt buckle. However, the alleged attacker, who appears in reports as Jose Cruz, is listed in papers from the District Attorney’s office as the victim. Cruz says that Muñiz and other men attacked him. Cruz was taken to a hospital and put in an induced coma. Jorgelina asks the the case be cleared and the charges dropped against her son.

The police confirmed that Muñiz was arrested August 6th of last year with 4 assault charges, one in the first degree. Muñiz returns to court May 5th. In the meantime, his friend, Danny Valdez, who was also arrested for the incident, was already deported to his country, El Salvador, according to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office

Clearly this is a complicated case that isn’t easy to sort out (although I will try). What I do know from my years of fighting police brutality in NYC with families of victims, is that the 70th precinct has a bad track record when it comes to dealing with the community (Abner Louima anyone?) Brooklyn D.A. Hynes and his office doesn’t carry much cred with me either after failing to prosecute killer cops in the cases of a number of young men of color. So the possibility that they could botch a case of homophobic violence within the Latino community doesn’t surprise me. Throw in the undocumented status of two of the young men involved and I am reminded of the comments made by Ali Noorani from Reform Immigration for America and National Immigration Forum about the intersections (or from his point of the view the lack of intersections) when it comes to being queer and undocumented.

Here you have a case of a young man who, according to his mom, came to the United States to escape homophobic violence, and because he reported homophobic violence he faces being deported back. For lgbt immigrant Latinos it’s not an issue of which came first, the homophobia or the racism. They cannot be separated, especially when dealing with systems of government whose role it is to erase both parts.