Team USA roller turns into newest Olympian to take intention at Trump and ICE: ‘What is happening in Minnesota is wrong’ | EUROtoday

Curler Rich Ruohonen turned the most recent Team USA athlete to wade into the talk on home politics on Tuesday, condemning immigration sweeps in his residence state of Minnesota that may be a hotbed for the game.

Various American athletes on the Winter Olympics have spoken out over occasions again residence, with skier Hunter Hess branded a “real loser” by an irritated US President Donald Trump over the weekend.

“I’d like to say I’m proud to be here to represent Team USA, and to represent our country. But we’d be remiss if we didn’t at least mention what’s going on in Minnesota,” mentioned Ruohonen, a 54-year-old private harm lawyer who works in Minnesota.

“What a tough time it’s been for everybody. This stuff is happening right around where we live,” he added in a press release on the finish of a press convention.

Protests have been happening round Minnesota after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) brokers killed two US residents as a part of Trump’s push towards unlawful immigration.

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“I am a lawyer, as you know. We have a constitution, and it allows us freedom of speech,” Ruohonen went on.

“It protects us from unreasonable searches and seizures. And makes it that we have to have probable cause to be pulled over. What’s happening in Minnesota is wrong. There’s no shades of grey. It’s clear.”

Minnesota is a curling stronghold within the US and has produced numerous Olympic opponents together with John Shuster, who skipped the boys’s workforce to gold on the 2018 Pyeongchang Games.

Ruohonen, an alternate for the boys’s workforce, mentioned he was pleased with the general public expressions in his residence.

“I really love what’s been happening there now. With people coming out, showing the love, the compassion, the integrity and respect for others that they don’t know, and helping them out,” he mentioned.

“We love Minnesota for that… we love our country. We’re playing for the US We’re playing for each other, we’re playing for our family and our friends that sacrificed so much to get here today.”

The Olympics, he mentioned, embody the identical values as these proven by compatriots in Minnesota.

“What the Olympics means is excellence, respect, friendship. We all, I think, exemplify that. We are playing for the people of Minnesota and the people around the country who share those same values, that compassion, that love, and that respect.”