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Hot off a surprising win in Wisconsin against GOP frontrunner Donald Trump, the Tea Party Senator from Texas Ted Cruz showed up in the Bronx on Wednesday to begin laying the groundwork for New York’s primary on 19 April.

But the Senator, so hardheaded and resistant to fact that he could only be a Christian Evangelist from Texas, should have learned one thing from his stop in the Bronx: he shouldn’t come back.

The two brothers that make up Latin hip-hop group Rebel Diaz confronted Cruz as he stepped out of his motorcade onto Westchester Avenue, a street that nearly bisects the entirety of the South Bronx.

Rodrigo Venegas and Gonzalo Venegas are artists and political activists who have been particularly vocal about immigrant rights throughout their career.

One of the brothers—it is unclear who—can be heard shouting “this is an immigrant community,” repeatedly at Cruz as he enters the Sabrosura 2 restaurant in the Bronx’s Soundview neighborhood.

Cruz tried ignoring both men, instead giving a blessing to an apparent supporter, but Rebel Diaz was not finished.

While Cruz addressed a crowd of supporters in a roped-off section of the restaurant, the Venegas brothers reminded him again of where he was, saying “this is an immigrant community, Ted Cruz.”

Police escorted both men out of the restaurant, but not before Rodrigo stated again and emphatically: “Ted Cruz has no business being in the Bronx! This is an immigrant community. We deal with climate change every single day, and he wants to say that it doesn’t exist.”

“We live in one of the poorest congressional districts in the country,” Venegas added. “And to receive this right-wing bigot is an insult to the whole community.”

Rebel Diaz could not be more correct.

The Bronx is as beautifully diverse as it is world renowned. The Bronx invented hip hop, the language of political activism and revolution. The Bronx IS an immigrant community and that it will stay. New York City is home to some 643,000 undocumented immigrants according to the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), a non-partisan Washington D.C. think tank.

Queens is home to a majority but the Bronx ranks third with a 117,000 undocumented immigrant population.

Perhaps even more dangerous than Donald Trump—who has called Mexicans criminals and rapists—Ted Cruz is masquerading a vehemently anti-immigrant, draconian policy of mass deportation as the solution to “a serious immigration problem in America.”

Cruz’s Immigration Plan begins with the premise that “the unsecured border with Mexico invites illegal immigrants, criminals, and terrorists to tread on American soil,” thereby equating immigrants with criminals and terrorists.



His plan goes on to promise the completion of 700 miles of wall on the Mexican border (holding up Israel’s apartheid wall as the perfect example of “an effective border wall”). He calls for tripling the number of border patrol agents, increasing drone use along the border and quadrupling the equipment available to them.

And it only gets worse.

A Cruz presidency increases the numbers of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) federal agency, granting state and local law enforcement the authority to collude with ICE agents in rounding up immigrants. This means that ICE can takeover any number of prisons across the interior of the country and turn them into immigrant detention centers.

The ACLU and other organizations have exhaustively documented human rights abuses at immigrant detention facilities, including the arbitrary detention of mothers and children fleeing violence in Central America.



Undocumented immigrants in New York City have been on high alert over the last two years, as immigration lawyers and advocates have reported a marked increase of ICE detaining people at their homes, in their neighborhoods, at work, school or courthouses.



A narrow win came for undocumented immigrants in New York City during the beginning of 2015, when the city’s third round of detainer laws passed. This banned the NYPD and Department of Corrections from cooperating with ICE authorities, and compels officers to ignore ICE requests for prisoner release dates, a previously popular pool federal authorities used to detain immigrants.

Cruz would overturn all of this progress.

In his immigration reform proposal, Cruz rails against New York City’s status as a so-called “sanctuary city,” a term that refers to places with politicians and laws friendlier to undocumented immigrants.

Abraham Paulous, Executive Director at Families for Freedom, an organization fighting deportations, told BK Live on a 25 January episode that “New York does a really great job for undocumented immigrants,” referring to its notoriety as a sanctuary city.

But Paulous adds that “as far as being a sanctuary city for those that have green cards and have some type of criminal conviction, either past or they’re going through it right now, New York City doesn’t really hold up that well.” In other words, the highly flawed criminal justice system is still endangering non-citizens’ stays in the U.S.

The Migrant Power Alliance estimates that the Department Of Corrections “helps place immigrant New Yorkers into the grip of the country's inhumane detention and deportation system that already deports approximately 400,000 people every year.”



Since taking office, President Obama has deported some 2 million undocumented immigrants.

Yet this is apparently not enough for Cruz, who has constantly opposed Obama’s executive actions on immigration, calling them “amnesty.” The Obama administration’s small steps toward making the immigration system more humane include initiatives allowing more undocumented residents to gain legal status.

Cruz would end birthright citizenship, as well as the provision of waivers to individuals whose parents immigrated with them as children, as Obama has done.

A Cruz administration would force a test on asylum seekers and prospective immigrants that prioritizes subjective attributes such as “lifetime earning potential,” “military skills,” and other “resources, or attributes that contribute to our nation.”

Those that don’t meet these vague standards would ostensibly be denied residency in the U.S. if Cruz is elected president.

And these policies deal only with undocumented immigrant policy.

Cruz would gut social services, close down abortion clinics and repeal Obamacare—all things that citizens of The Bronx, New York City and the entire country currently benefit from.

So when Rodrigo Venegas, one half of Rebel Diaz called Ted Cruz earlier today “a racist, who represents the white supremacy,” it only takes a look at Cruz’s record to understand this as true.

“We’re not going to allow that in our neighborhood,” adds Venegas. “It’s that simple.”

Ted Cruz is not welcome in the Bronx. And he’s not welcome in Brooklyn, Staten Island, Manhattan or Queens either.