In her own words: Laura Ingraham, Fox News's new star
Laura Ingraham debuts on the primetime of Fox News this Monday at 10:00 p.m., a powerful platform where she'll have a bigger audience for the stereotypes and demonization of Latinos she has promoted for years on radio.
Throughout her career, Ingraham has consistently targetted ethnic minorities, especially Latinos, according to Media Matters, a media monitoring center that has made a compilation of her offensive remarks about Latinos.
Here are some of them:
In this clip, Ingraham lashes out against Dreamers serving in the armed forces: "This is the American military. This is not the military of mercenary illegal immigrants!"
The Mexicans “have come here to murder and rape our people," she told a caller during a broadcast in March last year.
She has recommended immigration officials should tell deported immigrants that they will be shot if they dare to cross the border again.
Ingraham often mocks people who use Spanish, as well the accent of immigrants. In this clip from her radio show, she mocks MSNBC newscaster José Díaz-Balart for translating into Spanish an interview with an undocumented mother of three Dreamers. Ingraham laughs at Diaz-Balart for pronouncing the interviewee's name, María Cruz Ramírez, in correct Spanish instead of the way a native English speaker would.
In this other segment, Ingraham mocks a Hispanic woman for her accented English: “Wait, what did she say at the end? I can't -- I need a translator. I speak Spanish too. I'd rather have her just speak Spanish, at least I'd understand that.”
Here she suggests that the Hispanic origin of Supreme Court's justice Sonia Sotomayor disqualifies her from holding that position. Ingraham made this comment because Sotomayor used the term "undocumented immigrants" instead of "illegal aliens."
According to Ingraham, the choice of those words shows that Sotomayor's "allegiance obviously goes to her immigrant family background and not to the Constitution of the United States." (Sotomayor is a U.S. citizen by birth, as are her Puerto Rican parents).
Ingraham has also said that Univision and Telemundo are "toxic" for "denigrating the American experience."
“These are Hispanic-centric networks that I think in many ways ... revile the American experience, and I think even encourage the understanding that we're living on stolen land," she said.
One of the things that Ingraham rants against the most is that public funds are used at schools to help Latino children who don't speak good English: "The money this all costs is staggering. And, hence, I think that a lot of people are noticing this, have noticed it. People speaking broken language who work at various retail establishments. Language is terrible. They can't understand you, and you can't understand them. Sometimes you think you're in a foreign country.”