(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) Activists have called for the resignation of Teresa Haley, president of the Illinois State Conference NAACP, after she made anti-immigration remarks during a recent conference call, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Haley, a former NAACP Activist of the Year, made the comments in a virtual call with other NAACP leaders.
Specifically, she suggested that immigration harms urban blacks, who are ignored at the expense of illegal immigrants.
“Black people have been on the streets forever and ever, and nobody cares, because they say that we’re drug addicts, we’ve got mental health issues,” Haley ranted.
“But these immigrants who come over here, they’ve been raping people, they’ve been breaking into homes, they’re like savages as well,” she continued. “They don’t speak the language and they look at us like we’re crazy.”
When asked about her comments later, Haley said that the story was fabricated, noting that “with AI, anything is possible.”
In response, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker called the remarks “reprehensible” and urged her to take responsibility for them.
“I would hope that she would apologize for the remarks,” he said, noting that “immigrants in this country are all around us.”
Pritzker—the white, Jewish scion of the Hyatt hotel fortune—suggested that all Americans were immigrants, seeming to dismiss Haley’s argument in her rant that only blacks were brought to America involuntarily.
“Virtually all of us came here from somewhere else,” said the governor.
“So remarks like that are commentary on our entire society,” he added. “Extraordinarily inappropriate.”
Haley also was called out internally by Patrick Watson, former president of the DuPage County Branch NAACP.
According to Watson, Haley was engaged in language that could undermine the NAACP’s overall effort.
“This kind of rhetoric drives that kind of hate,” Watson said, distancing himself and the “black community” as a whole from Haley’s “hateful” speech.
“This is not the sentiment of the black community as a whole, it’s a vocal minority,” he added. “Public sentiment is very much in favor of helping migrants in DuPage. You can be for raising up your people without denigrating other people.”
Haley is not the only member of the black community to voice her frustration over the growing immigration problem, however.
The Biden administration’s open-border policies have disproportionately impacted the urban black community in places like Chicago and New York City as the two groups compete both for jobs and public welfare benefits—with illegal immigrants seeming to get the better end of the bargain.
In New York, for instance, longtime residents of the Queensbridge projects complained about the shortage of Thanksgiving turkeys.
A number of cities have begun turning away migrants or busing them elsewhere.
And some black members of the Chicago City Council have even proposed a measure to revoke its longstanding “sanctuary city” status on an upcoming ballot referendum.
“We have other Democratic cities—Denver, California, L.A., sending their people to Chicago, New York. They’re sending their migrants to Chicago. Why? Because they are saying, ‘We can’t take anymore,’” said Alderman Anthony Beale, who has backed the ballot measure, at a council meeting in November.
“Chicago has yet to say, ‘We can’t take anymore,’” he added. “We have to draw the line somewhere.”
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
