WH Event on Murder Victims of Illegal Immigrants Featured Giant Trump Autographs
Immigration is back in the news and you know what that means: yet another weird and exploitative White House event in which President Donald Trump trots out families of the victims of people murdered by illegal immigrants to drum up fear of foreigners.
This had all the hallmarks of a typical Trump-demonizes-immigrants event, including the president repeating the outright lie that illegal immigrants commit more crimes than Americans.
The spectacle was clearly a response to critics of the Trump administrations “zero tolerance” border policy, which separated migrant children from their parents who crossed the border. The idea that U.S. authorities were removing children from their parents and caging them in detention centers drew a backlash so potent that it drove Trump to sign an executive order this week ending separations.
But he’s not done with the fight, and the event on Friday was evidence of that.
“These are the American citizens permanently separated from their loved ones. The word permanently being the word that you have to think about. Permanently. They are not separated for a day or two days. Permanently separated,” Trump said at the event.
The “Angel Families,” as they’ve been dubbed, reiterated Trump’s point, emphasizing that the separation from their loved ones was permanent, as they were killed by “illegal aliens,” and not temporary, like the migrant families at the border.
Their stories are truly sad, and worth reading about. But the event, in all of its exploitative weirdness, also had a bizarre (but very Trumpian) aesthetic flourish: as each Angel Parent spoke, they displayed a blown up photo of their murdered loved one. And each photo bore a giant Trump autograph, in his signature sharpie marker.
[image via screengrab]
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