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Donald Trump reportedly sought a reptile-filled trench to ward off migrant families at the southern border, even “prompting aides to seek a cost estimate,” The New York Times reported. It’s ridiculous—and exactly the kind of sick cosplaying you’d expect from someone who thinks of himself as some sort of king, and who expects to be treated like one. But the truly horrifying story from the report is not his demented aquatic park, but rather his demand for continued violence against migrant families.
“He wanted the wall electrified,” the report continued, “with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh.” That wasn’t enough for him, though. He wanted them to suffer. “After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down. That’s not allowed either, they told him.”
This is not the first time the president has advocated violence against vulnerable families at the border. During a campaign rally in Florida this past May, the president of the United States chuckled and joked when a supporter in the audience called for shooting them. “How do you stop these people?” Trump asked. “Shoot them!” the supporter yelled. The crowd laughed—laughed—as Trump replied, “That’s only in the Panhandle you can get away with that stuff.”
It would be just a few months later when a white supremacist terrorist complaining about an “Hispanic invasion of Texas”—this is the same language Trump has spewed at his rallies at least 19 times—drove nine hours to the peaceful border community of El Paso to shoot Mexicans, murdering 22. Just days after that mass terror shooting, his “unapologetic” campaign still refused to stop using “invasion” in its advertising. “A senior Trump political adviser had a single-word answer—‘no’—when asked if the campaign would change the tenor of its ads.”
But some of his violence has also been shielded from the eyes of the nation. It’s been happening in detention facilities, where, for the first time in nearly a decade, migrant children have died under U.S. custody. An autopsy report revealed that one of those children, 16-year-old Carlos Gregorio Hernández Vásquez, died alone, next to a toilet, in a Border Patrol facility in May. In video reviewed as part of his autopsy, Texas Monthly reports, the boy “is seen lying on the floor, vomiting on the floor, and walks over to the commode, where he sits and later lies back and expires.”
Trump has shown a total disregard, and even contempt, for these deaths. Following the in-custody deaths of seven-year-old Jakelin Ameí Rosmery Caal Maquin and eight-year-old Felipe Gómez Alonzo nearly a year ago in December, Trump offered no condolences or sympathy or remorse, instead blaming the childrens’ parents and his political opponents for their deaths in a lie-laden tirade. When 10-year-old Darlyn Cristabel Cordova-Valle died September 29 in U.S. custody, his administration kept her death a secret for eight months. Eight months.
Trump has also pursued violence and intentional cruelty against migrant children and their parents in blatant violation of the courts. While a federal judge ordered his administration to stop the state-sanctioned kidnapping of children at the border last year, more than 1,000 families have continued to be ripped apart since then, the American Civil Liberties Union said in court last month. “We’re talking about permanent trauma to these children for no real reason,” an ACLU attorney said. But there has been a reason: cruelty.
Experts have said Trump has been in violation of his oath of office from the moment he held up his hand and swore to uphold it nearly three years ago, and just about every day since then has been a thuggish disregard for the law, norms, and common decency, leading us to the current Ukraine coverup. Donald Trump should be impeached and removed from office for abuse of power, yes, but he should also be impeached and removed from office for his human rights abuses targeting the vulnerable. Until then, how many more will suffer and die?