A family in Kansas received a hateful letter in the mail on Thursday telling them to take down the Mexican flag outside their house, KSNT reported.
Teresita Linares from Topeka checked her mail on Thursday afternoon to find a plain white envelope with no return address, and inside was a hateful letter demanding that the family take down their Mexican flag, which flies next to an American one in front of their house.
“If you have become an American, you should fly our flag proudly and pack the Mexico flag in a box and never open it,” the letter read.
The letter continued to tell the family to go back to Mexico; Linares and her family had moved to Topeka from Kansas City a year ago, but her parents had moved from Mexico to the United States a long time ago, she told KSNT.
“It’s our flag and it’s our roots and it’s our property,” Linares said. “It’s just so much hate that’s still going around here and just old mentalities and there are people stuck in their old ways and really don’t want to open up.”
She told KSNT she feared for the safety of her children and expressed her disappointment that her children would have to face discrimination like that in 2021.
Regardless, she mentioned that she hopes, just days before the Fourth of July, other multicultural families can feel accepted, regardless of where they came from.
“They can fly their flags and still be proud to be an American and a Mexican, or wherever they’re from,” Linares said.
She promised KSNT that she will be buying more Mexican flags to put in her yard.
Anonymous letters were used in Oregon as well to tell residents in a small town outside of Portland to take down their Black Lives Matter flags from outside their homes.
The letter read, “Thank you for flying the BLM flag. It will make it easier to identify who is a socialist, racist, woke and un-American when the fighting breaks out.”
One victim of the incident in Oregon had told The Oregonian, “It seems cowardly that someone does this and doesn’t have the goal to even talk or confront us. If you have an issue or grievance about that sign, why? Let’s talk about it, not hurl insults or mail letters.”
Newsweek reached out to the Topeka Police Department for a comment but did not hear back in time for publication.
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