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Bigotry and Hate All in a Day’s Work for Trump and his Administration

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The following is a statement from Mario Carillo, Texas Director for America’s Voice, in response to the Trump administration’s particularly grotesque Thursday, during which Donald Trump rallied a crowd in Minnesota using some of his most aggressive anti-refugee (and anti-Rep. Omar) rhetoric to date; a Texas sheriff spewed grotesquely hate-filled rhetoric about immigrants from the White House press room; and a new Reuters report that the U.S. government is sending thousands of babies and children back to horrific conditions in Mexico, all in the name of “protecting” migrants: 

The administration and its cronies are back to relentlessly pushing racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric for all the world to see. The ugliness on display, from the President’s rally in Minnesota to Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn fear mongering against immigrants from a White House microphone, is more of the dangerous rhetoric designed to dehumanize and demonize human beings. In Texas and around the country, we know how such rhetoric enables white supremacist terrorists to take action. In my hometown of El Paso we are still mourning 22 people shot and killed in just such an attack. We fear that a White House engulfed in an impeachment dragnet will get uglier than ever.

The dehumanization of immigrants and their families also translates into nativist policies. As Reuters reports today, “the U.S. government has ordered 13,000 migrants under 18, including more than 400 infants, to wait with their families in Mexico for U.S. immigration court hearings, a Reuters analysis of government data found.”

The United States is putting kids, toddlers and infants in harm’s way at the border and destroying the very idea that the U.S. should be a destination and a home for immigrants and refugees.

We know where this leads because we are already seeing it. It’s the kind of rhetoric that makes people hate each other. It’s the kind of rhetoric that creates a climate for violence and human rights abuses. It’s the kind of rhetoric that motivated a shooter to slaughter innocent people at an El Paso Walmart.

To Trump, it’s all in a day’s work. To the rest of us, it is a dangerous descent.