Mr. Trump Reopens the Wounds of a Hate Crime

Donald Trump is scheduled to speak at a Republican Party fund-raiser on Thursday in Patchogue, a village on the south shore of Long Island, about 60 miles from Manhattan.

This is a wretched development, a disgraceful provocation by the Suffolk County Republicans and their chairman, John Jay LaValle, who invited him.

There is no place that should welcome Mr. Trump’s politics, but the choice of Patchogue is particularly repellent. Patchogue is where Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadorean immigrant, was fatally stabbed in 2008 by a white teenager, one of a marauding gang of high school boys who had made a nighttime sport of assaulting Latino men. The Republicans will be toasting Mr. Trump in a dance hall called the Emporium, on the same street as the crime scene, steps away from where Mr. Lucero fell.

That attack helped to identify Long Island with vicious anti-immigrant attitudes and violence. After the killing, scores of Latino residents came forward to say that they, too, had been hunted and harassed by white youths for years. The Suffolk County Police Department had routinely ignored their complaints; widespread reports of racial profiling and other police abuses prompted a Justice Department investigation and oversight.

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