California Council Member Forced To Resign After Saying ‘Illegals Should Have To Work Like Slaves’

A member of the?Silver Lake, California Neighborhood Council has resigned from her office for insensitive remarks she made about immigrants online.

Real_mexicans
Image Via Wikimedia

Karen Speitel announced her resignation after online posts she made came to light. Speitel posted the racist remarks?in the comment thread of a??KNBC-TV story?about a tunnel used to smuggle drugs between the United States ?and Mexico.

After seeing the report, Speitel wrote:

?All illegals should have to work like slaves for free for every single citizen who came here the right way! Shame on the sneaky, lawless dregs who have no respect for the law and how hard real citizens have had to work to become legal.?

Work like slaves, huh? Well, Ms. Speitel, I see you managed to offend two groups of people who have been discriminated against in the ugly history of this nation, African-Americans and Hispanics. Apparently you hate anyone who is the least little bit different from you.

In a later post, Speitel blamed immigrants for spoiling their “pockets” of Los Angeles and added:

“The distruction [sic] I see all over is from Mexicans.?

And the ignorance we see in your words is only magnified by your inability to spell a word as simple as “destruction.”

When fellow council members began to urge Speitel to resign, she initially refused. After the council censured her, she finally relented and issued a statement in which she claimed she made the offensive remarks “out of anger” and then continued with this maudlin morsel of tripe:

?Because a large portion of the board requested me to resign and then requested the censure I felt that perhaps my resignation could possibly help heal the terrible pain I have caused members of the community as well as members of the board.”

Council Vice Chair, Seamus Garrity said he was shocked by Speitel’s online rant:

?While a person has free speech, I think that you have to call into question their judgment when they are going to be voting on things that affect the community at large, and they have a skewed opinion of a large percentage of that community.”?