'You Indians Are Everywhere': Woman Arrested for Hate Attack in Texas
07:49 GMT 26.08.2022 (Updated: 16:31 GMT 08.12.2022)
© Photo : Reema Rasool
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The FBI said last September that hate crimes against Indians, particularly Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus, have been on the rise in the United States. Washington previously said such hate crimes are an “aberration” that don’t represent the American view. New Delhi says it takes up these attacks with its US counterparts.
A woman has been arrested after racially taunting and attacking a group of Indian women at a parking lot in Dallas, Texas.
The victims recorded the incident on camera and it surfaced on social media the following day.
The lady, who described herself in the video as a Mexican-American born in the US, was identified as Esmeralda Upton, a resident of Plano city in north Texas.
“These f***ing Indians. They come to America because they want a better life… You come to our country and you want everything,” the woman can be heard saying in the video. “Wherever I go, you Indians are f***ing everywhere,” she goes on to say.
“If life was so great in India, why are you all here,” she asks the Indian women.
When the Indian woman refuses to turn off the camera, the American woman threatens to shoot her as she appears to be reaching for a gun in her handbag. She was then seen hitting one of the women.
This is so scary. She actually had a gun and wanted to shoot because these Indian American women had accents while speaking English.
— Reema Rasool (@reemarasool) August 25, 2022
Disgusting. This awful woman needs to be prosecuted for a hate crime. pic.twitter.com/SNewEXRt3z
A statement by Plano Police on Thursday said that cops reached the scene soon after the incident happened, after receiving a distress call. It added that the attacker was arrested on Thursday and has been slapped with multiple charges, including assault bodily injury and making “terroristic threats.”
Police said that they were also investigating the incident as a “hate crime”. The attacker is currently being held on a $10,000 bond, police said.
27 October 2021, 15:00 GMT
The Indian-American community is one of the biggest immigrant groups in the US.
According to official estimates, around 4.6 million Indian-Americans lived in the US in 2019, constituting 1.6 percent of the total population.
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) said that immigrants from India comprised 6 percent of overall new arrivals in 2020. Only Mexico, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, and China sent more newcomers to the US in 2020, according to the US government.
