Dem lawmaker files formal complaint against lawyer who threatened to call ICE on people speaking Spanish

A Democratic lawmaker and New York City borough president filed a formal complaint against the New York attorney whose rant threatening a group of Spanish-speaking restaurant employees and customers went viral on Wednesday.

Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.) and Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. wrote in a letter that they are filing a complaint against Aaron Schlossberg, the man in the video, with the disciplinary committee of the New York State Unified Court System.

“What was witnessed in the vile video … is [a] humiliating and insulting attack on the more than 50 years of progress that this nation has made since the Civil Rights movement,” they wrote.

The video shows Schlossberg aggressively confronting a restaurant manager after hearing customers and employees speaking Spanish. He then threatens to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on them.

{mosads}”Your staff is speaking Spanish to customers when they should be speaking English,” he says in the video. “My guess is they’re not documented, so my next call is to ICE to have each one of them kicked out of my country.”

Espaillat and Diaz wrote in the complaint that Schlossberg’s “audacity to profile and verbally assault” the people in the video is “a violation of our civil society.”

“There is simply no place for the scourge of racism and the vulgarity of bigotry in our great nation…,” they wrote. “The egregiousness of bald-faced racism, in all of its ugliness, must be rejected and replaced with the kindness, solidarity and sense of togetherness that has made this American experiment in democracy a shining example for all the world to see and admire for over two centuries.”

The video of Schlossberg drew widespread criticism, including a petition to have him disbarred and a stream of negative reviews on the office’s Yelp page.

One activist seeking to troll Schlossberg set up a GoFundMe page to raise money to send a Mariachi band and taco truck to his office. The page has raised $1,094 of its $500 goal and credits Twitter account “ALT-Immigration,” an immigration activist account, with the idea.