Miguel Layún , a soccer player on the Mexican national team, publicly denounced a Toys R Us store in Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal, for using a miniature border wall as decoration.
Layún, who also plays professionally for the country’s FC Porto club team, tweeted a picture of the wall, which included signs with arrows pointing to “USA” and “Mexico.”
“How sad that the @ToysRUs in Gaia has this kind of decoration,” the soccer star wrote in Spanish in a tweet Saturday. “We chose to leave when we saw this ‘joke.’”
The 28-year-old also shared the photo on Instagram with another message about his disappointment in seeing this in a store that caters to kids.
“It doesn’t scare me, but I think it’s a lack of respect on the part of @toysrus in Gaia to have this decoration,” Layún wrote in Spanish in the caption. “An inappropriate message for children. Let them grow without prejudices.”
President Donald Trump promised his supporters a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border during his campaign. Trump signed an executive order instructing for the construction of the wall last month; he has said that Mexico will pay for the structure, eventually, but the U.S. government will finance the project in the meantime.
Toys R Us promptly responded to Layún via Twitter to apologize and say it had contacted the Portugal location to have the display removed.
After the company’s response, Layún posted a video on Twitter thanking Toys R Us for its apology and asking that none of the employees at the store be fired over the incident.
“I also wanted to say that it’d hurt me a lot if this ended in someone’s firing or loss of employment at the Gaia toy store, because that wasn’t the point,” he said in Spanish in the video. “The idea was to show that respect is important, to show that it’s a delicate subject that is affecting and is generating difficult problems for many people. So, it’s not a subject to play around with.”
H/T Latino Rebels
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