Illinois civil rights leader urged to resign after speech calling migrants 'savages'

Teresa Haley, the state conference president of the Illinois NAACP, is facing calls to resign after disparaging remarks about migrants that her peers are calling "hate speech" during a Zoom leadership meeting, reported The Daily Beast on Wednesday.

“The comments came up when some of the Chicago-based presidents started to talk about the migrant crisis, the funding that was going into neighborhoods, and they had differing opinions from my own. It's OK to have differing opinions,” DuPage County NAACP leader Patrick Watson told Brooke Leigh Howard. “They had different opinions about some of the resources that were going to the community, that resources weren't going towards individuals within the community, even though those resources are coming from different sources. …That's okay to have a different opinion. But President Haley engaged in what I would call absolute hate speech.”

A video of the incident, provided to the Beast, showed Haley saying, “The busloads are coming, and we’re seeing families on the street,” and that migrants receive far more care and resources than the homeless Black population in Illinois. “But these immigrants we got coming over here, they been raping people, they been breaking into homes. They’re like savages as well. They don’t speak the language, and they look at us like we’re crazy because we were the only people in America who were brought over here against our wills and were slaves, sold into slavery."

Gov. J.B. Pritzker has also condemned the remarks, calling on Haley to issue an apology.

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For her part, Haley outright denies that she even made the remarks shown in the video, telling ABC 7 Chicago from her vacation in Dubai that, “With AI, anything is possible.”

The recent surge in migrants has resulted in cities all over the country facing an influx of people who need shelter and resources, often straining local governments. Republicans are demanding that changes to asylum laws be part of an aid package to Israel and Ukraine, leading to high-stakes talks with little time before the holidays to get a deal finalized.