Online trolls are using immigration as a wedge issue for November elections
WASHINGTON - Clad in military jackets, with bandannas hiding their faces, Eddie Alvarez and other members of the Brown Berets clashed with other protesters in Murrieta in July 2014.
On one side, more than 200 anti-immigration activists waving American flags stopped buses carrying 140 migrant women and children to a nearby Border Patrol center in Riverside County. On the other side, Alvarez and several dozen other counterprotesters rushed out to defend the detainees.
"We knew they might not understand English, but they understood the hate," Alvarez recalled recently.
Photos of the heated encounters - and of the Brown Berets, a militant Chicano group formed in the 1970s - circulated widely on the internet. But Alvarez, 21, was surprised to see his image on Aztlan Warriors, one of 32 pages or accounts that Facebook shut
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