Gary Hahn, North Carolina State’s play-by-play radio voice for football and men’s basketball, was suspended indefinitely on Dec. 30 after an on-air comment about “all the illegal aliens down in El Paso” during a broadcast of the Duke’s Mayo Bowl.
While North Carolina State was playing Maryland in the Mayo Bowl at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, Hahn gave a score update for the Sun Bowl.
“In the Sun Bowl and amongst all the illegal aliens down in El Paso, it’s UCLA 14 and Pittsburgh 6. That’s with 11:15 to go in the second quarter,” Hahn said.
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Maryland upset No. 23 North Carolina State, 16–12 while Pittsburgh beat No. 18 UCLA, 37–35. Hahn, who has served in his broadcasting roles at North Carolina State since 1991 and was named the North Carolina Sportscaster of the Year in 2011 and 2020, was disciplined by Learfield Communications, his employer.
“Learfield has suspended Wolfpack Sports Network play-by-play announcer Gary Hahn from his agreement indefinitely following comments made during today’s Duke’s Mayo Bowl radio broadcast,” Wolfpack Sports Properties general manager Kyle Winchester said in a statement.
Held in El Paso since 1935, the Sun Bowl took place on Dec. 30 amid a border crisis that led the city’s Democratic mayor Oscar Leeser to declare a state of emergency last month.
The Sun Bowl Fan Fiesta, scheduled for Dec. 29, was canceled because the city’s convention center is a temporary shelter for illegal immigrants.
On Dec. 20, Leeser said that around 20,000 migrants had assembled at the southern border awaiting the end of Title 42 so they can try to enter the city. Since then, more have arrived. Others have crossed the border and have been released into El Paso.
Publicly available data shows that 84,082 illegal immigrants were released into El Paso between Aug. 22 and Dec. 11, 2022. El Paso’s population is 678,000.
The aliens were allowed to stay in the United States while their court hearings were pending.
Title 42 was created as part of the Public Health Service Act under President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944 and designed to prevent the introduction of contagious diseases in the United States.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the Trump administration invoked the public health order to close all non-essential border travel and trade in an attempt to curb the pandemic.
For the 12 months that ended on Sept. 30, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) used the order more than 2.76 million times, compared with 1.72 million times in fiscal year 2021, which was the previous high.
On Dec. 26, the Supreme Court voted 5–4 to allow Title 42 to remain in place, after an emergency filing by 19 Republican-led states.
The court said it would hear arguments in February about whether the coalition of Republican states can challenge a lower-court ruling that ordered the Biden administration to halt Title 42.
Texas National Guard members built razor-wire border fencing near El Paso during Christmas weekend.
On Dec. 28, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott wrote on Twitter: “Texas is adding shipping containers to the US-Mexico border in El Paso. This is in addition to the razor wire and National Guard. Together, the strategies are causing illegal immigration at that location to plummet.”
Hahn has not commented about his “all the illegal aliens down in El Paso” remark.
In 2021, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and CBP, said they would discontinue the use of “alien,” “illegal alien,” and “assimilation” in internal policy documents and communication with the public.
“In an effort to rebuild public trust and reshape our agency’s image, ICE will make efforts to avoid using terminology that might be perceived by others as offensive or otherwise disparaging,” ICE Acting Director Tae Johnson said in an email to employees when the change was announced.
The reaction on Twitter Hahn’s suspension was mixed. Some called it another example of cancel culture while others deemed the comment as derogatory.
“To think it is one thing. To say it is another. To casually throw it out at work, during a broadcast, as if it were nothing at all…that’s a different level of ignorance,” one person wrote.
“We are suspending folks when they state facts now,“ wrote another. ”The mayor issued a state of emergency.”
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