This news from Long Island: four teenagers have been arrested and charged with a hate crime for firebombing the home of a family of Mexican day laborers.

The local district attorney said there was no question that they “targeted this particular house because there were Mexicans living there.”

The teens are believed to have thrown live fireworks into the home just hours after much of the nation celebrated the Fourth of July. No one was injured in the blaze which gutted the house.

One of the teens legal guardians told Newsday the boys were being treated unfairly. She said, “They are making an example of them because they don’t know what to do with all those Mexicans over there. It was absolutely wrong, what they did, but it was the Fourth of July and it was a firework. It wasn’t a Molotov cocktail or a firebomb.

Day laborers in the Long Island community of Farmingville have been targeted before. Two years ago, two day-laborers were severely beaten.