Chef José Andrés, the humanitarian who helped feed Puerto Rico following the Hurricane Maria disaster and became a target of Donald Trump after he pulled out a business deal over the then-candidate’s racist claims that Mexican immigrants are criminals and “rapists,” has revealed they had a private confrontation after the remark:
"I remember him calling me and telling me, 'Jose, we're winning, we're winning,'" Andrés told Axelrod. "I'm like, 'Mr. Trump, I'm not running on your ticket. I only want to open a successful restaurant and you with your comments, you are disparaging the same immigrants and Hispanics I am. I owe myself to those same Hispanics. My success is on the shoulders of those immigrants.'"
And, Trump has built his success on the shoulders of immigrants as well. It’s just that one of these business men honors it and acknowledges it as an immigrant himself, while the other deports them, slanders them, and compares them to “animals,” all the while using their labor to build and run his family’s hotels, vineyards and resorts:
"The reality is these we have 11 million undocumented," Andrés said. "They are part of the DNA of America. We have 'Dreamers,' super prepared Americans, they came here when they were babies. Immigration and immigration reform is not a problem for us to solve. It's an opportunity for America to see."
"I believe that one day,” he continued, “immigrants and especially the undocumented ... one day they'll say we're going to stop doing anything until you recognize who we are, that we are not ghosts in the system but real people contributing to the American dream." He also suggested that maybe Congress needs more chefs, and after seeing the good he did in Puerto Rico and Haiti, that doesn’t sounds like a bad idea at all.