The President of the Mexican Senate, Senator Gerardo Fernández Noroña, suggested that the country attempt to take a portion of the United States amid the ongoing Los Angeles riots.
“I was at Trump Tower when President-Elect Donald Trump was days away from taking the oath of office for the first time as President,” said Fernández Noroña. “I said ‘yes, we’ll build the wall, yes, we’ll pay for it, but we’ll do it according to the map of Mexico from 1830.”
“If you can see, maybe a third or at least a quarter of the North American territory was part of Mexico until 1846,” he said. “We were stripped of these territories.”
The 1830 map shows California, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona as belonging to Mexico.
Fernández Noroña emphasized that Mexicans “were settled there before the nation now known as the United States.”
“With this geography, how can we talk about liberating Los Angeles and California?” he added. “Liberate them from who? The Mexicans who are settled in that place are settled in what has been their homeland.”
“The United States government has the right to implement whatever immigration measures it deems appropriate, certainly,” Fernández Noroña claimed. “But they have no right to violate the dignity of migrants. They have no right to separate families, they have no right to subject them to suffering, persecution, or harassment.”
Earlier this week, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum condemned the protests in Los Angeles while defending the presence of the rioters.
“Mexican men and women living in the United States are good men and women, honest people who went to the United States to seek a better life for themselves and to contribute to their families,” Sheinbaum said, as per the Associated Press. “They are not criminals; they are good, honest men and women.”
