Trump’s Body Count:
Deaths, Disappearances, and Rapes of Immigrants and Refugees
By Al Carroll
From the start, Trump made hating and fearing immigrants based on their color, race, ethnicity, or “foreignness” central to his appeal. He announced his run for president by a conspiracy laced racist harangue, infamously declaring, “When Mexico sends its people…. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists.”
This was far from the last time. His open immigrant hating rants became a central part of first his campaign, and then his presidency:
“Not just Mexicans…people from all over that are killers and rapists are coming into this country.”
“The Mexican government…they send the bad ones over.”
“Somebody’s doing it! Who’s doing the raping?! Who’s doing the raping?!”
“Jeb Bush has to like the Mexican illegals because of his wife.”
“Jeb Bush is crazy, who cares that he speaks Mexican.”
“Get out of my country!” (To Jorge Ramos, a Latino reporter and American citizen. Trump then had his security throw him out of the press conference, not liking his tough questioning.)
Still, everyone but his supporters were surprised by the sheer brutality of Trump ordering physical attacks on immigrants and refugees, the mass deaths by incompetence and neglect, tear gassing children, putting them in actual cages, and exposing refugees to the threat of murder, rape, and human trafficking. Most of the opposition to Trump’s anti immigrant hatred focused on defeating first his Muslim ban arbitrarily blocking (not just Muslim) people from entering the US, and then stopping his ludicrous attempts to build a border wall. Most were dumbfounded at having to try to prevent families from being torn apart, publicly displayed in de facto pens for animals, and subjected to not just arbitrary, but often incredibly petty cruelty like females not being allowed tampons.
Dozens of Deaths
At least 29 immigrants were killed in custody during Trump’s time in office, of abuse, neglect, misdiagnosis, and preventable illnesses, including suicides. 24 deaths were in ICE detention, five in Border Patrol or other federal law agency custody. This is a record high death toll almost since they first began keeping records on immigrant detention deaths, which, believe it or not, has only been done since 2004. Only GW Bush exceeded that death toll back in 2004.
While Obama had a higher number of deportations, they were noted for their being meticulously planned, legally backed, and otherwise humane treatment of immigrants. Even within ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), many admit that Trump’s high death toll is due to unprecedented levels of poorly planned detentions, deportations, arrests, and a cavalier lack of concern for health treatment.
The list of Trump’s immigrant and refugee deaths is a horror show, one preventable and inexcusable death after another. A Mexican immigrant dying after several days of high fever because he was in solitary. An Indian immigrant hanging himself, and he was never put on suicide watch. Two addicted immigrants dying while going through withdrawal, without adequate medication or care. Five children dying in custody. Homeland Security’s Inspector General’s office found a long list of ICE abuses and neglect, poor medical care, rotting food, and even nooses hanging in detention centers.
Every bit as horrific, especially since Trump and most of his supporters claim to be very devout Christians and strongly pro life, is that at least 28 immigrant or refugee women miscarried, losing their babies while in ICE custody. Previously, pregnant women were automatically released to make harm to their unborn children be far less likely. ICE even automatically tests women and teen girls to make sure to catch pregnancies that the females may not yet know about.
But Trump ordered that humane practice ended. Now almost all pregnant immigrant or refugee women stay in custody in the notoriously poor health conditions of ICE prisons. The deaths even included a Honduran woman, six months pregnant, whose child died stillborn, while held by Border Patrol.
Thousands of Missing Children and Broken Families
One of the most notorious of Trump’s scandals in 2018 was the widely reported news that over 1,500 immigrant and refugee children were missing from ICE detention. At the same time came the highly public images of children in cages. Trump and other racists’ defense of these practices was to blame Obama, blame the victims or their families, and question the numbers.
All of these tactics failed quickly. News reports uncovered that the Obama administration only rarely detained children, with every effort made to reunite families quickly. The cages, most of them built in Obama’s time in office, were intended to hold adults for a few hours at most, much like a holding cell in police precincts. Trump changed all of that, ordered them used to permanently hold children or adults for months or years.
Trump and other racists quickly turned to victim blaming, either not knowing or more often not caring that many of these immigrants were refugees. Driven by some of the highest murder and other violent crime rates in the world, caravans of refugees fled from Central America towards the US, just as they had done in even larger numbers in the 1980s during civil wars and genocide. (It’s worth noting that conservative icon Ronald Reagan did not try to keep refugees out, or target them with deportation. In fact, he gave amnesty to 3 million immigrants without papers.)
Trump ordered all Central American refugees barred, that they be not permitted to even apply for refuge. Over 100 refugees gathered at the border were tear gassed, including children, some in diapers. Their parents put themselves between the projectiles and gas, and hurried their children away. Video of the incident shows a few migrants threw rocks as they fled, which the Border Patrol then falsely claimed had been thrown first. None of the officers were injured.
Trump’s response, said with a broad smile on his face, was then to claim without evidence the children had been kidnapped by “grabbers” and that the tear gassing was “very minor” and “very safe.” Tear gas is far more of a risk of permanent damage to children than adults. It can permanently blind, scar the lungs, and is even barred under international and US law from being used against (obviously only adult) soldiers.
Denying refugees the chance to apply for refuge, and even attacking them violently, is not just violation of both international and American law. It also goes against every traditional Christian belief on compassion and caring for strangers, orphans, the poor, and specifically for refugees. The best known example was Joseph and Mary fleeing with the baby Jesus from Israel to Egypt. Attacking refugees fleeing violence simply goes against basic human decency, no matter what your faith.
The final tactics racists used to defend the caging of children and breaking families apart was to deny the numbers. The original numbers given for how many children were missing were confused. But that never meant they did not happen, nor that the pain and trauma of separation were not very real.
Initial reports were that about 1,500 children were missing, with ICE unsure what happened to them. There were actually far more victims than originally believed, over 5,400 families deliberately broken up by Trump’s orders specifically targeting families. Over 500 children were still missing over three years later. How many went into hiding in the US, how many went back to their home countries, and how many were killed or kidnapped by human traffickers, we don’t know.
Where Obama had carefully avoided family separations and worked to reunite them when it happened, Trump deliberately did the opposite. He believed it was a loophole that immigrants took advantage of. So rather than target individual immigrants without family members, as Obama did, Trump openly believed breaking up families and traumatizing children to be a deterrent.
To justify it, Trump was willing to use violence and deception. (“They’re grabbers” and not the real parents of the children.) He also vowed to rigidly enforce laws, no matter his own long checkered history of breaking laws from taxes to civil rights to corruption to (many argue) even treason. And when convenient to rationalize his own prejudice, he was fine with repeatedly breaking American and international human rights law which allows refugees to apply for protection as a basic human right.
Thousands Sexually Abused
Over 4,500 immigrants, many of them minors, gave accounts of being abused in ICE custody, mostly by ICE officers or private security contractors. Many of these accounts read like reports of Japanese soldiers attacking “comfort women” in the notorious rape camps during World War II.
ICE guards and private security filmed women and girls while they showered. Guards both federal and private demanded sex or the immigrant would be deported. Guards routinely groped and fondled detainees. Other officers were usually indifferent or flatly refused to do anything when their fellow officers were reported. Threats of retaliation were constant. At the most extreme, there are accounts of brutal gang rapes.
ICE maintains many or even most of these accounts are false. But false reports of rape, other sexual assault, or harassment are widely estimated by scholars and investigators as being very low, under 5%. If anything, these crimes are severely underreported. The survivors never report it, are afraid to because they fear reprisal, deportation, and understandably think the criminals won’t be punished.
One of the other most common defenses of these assaults is victim blaming, the argument that these women and girls should not be putting themselves at risk. But females make up only 14.5% of those detained by ICE. Very few of them were traveling alone, especially on foot through the border. They either traveled with relatives, or like the majority of immigrants without papers, they came by plane. Most immigrants without papers came as either tourists or students and overstayed. They only became at risk of rape and abuse because of ICE officers or private security who are rapists and abusers.
Abuse is made worse because first of all most females are held in privately run centers. These guards are less trained, less screened, and lower quality than ICE officers. Basically, they are the ones who were not good enough to become actual law enforcement, or just needed a job, and this was better than minimum wage work. It’s also very obvious that if you have a job where punishment for sexual abuse is rare, it will start to attract abusers, much like Christian clergy and Boy Scout volunteers.
Abuse is also far worse because almost all centers hold both males and females. Only two are for women only. It’s even worse for transgender men and women. Four of the 17 centers that hold them are all male. Only one of the 17 centers has any area at all exclusively for transgender prisoners. Transgenders, contrary to bigoted stereotypes, are generally calm and passive people, and far more likely to be the victims of crime, including sexual assault, than to carry it out.
What is Trump’s guilt in all of these atrocities? Trump made absolutely no effort to stop any of it. He often repeatedly denied any of it happened, or justified it and even gloried in inflicting pain on those he clearly publicly hated, cheering it on. He presided over a massively brutal police apparatus and bureaucracy as the chief dehumanizer of people based on race, color, ethnicity, and nation.
Some large parts of this campaign of abuse were deliberate. Targeting families and breaking them up was deliberate. Not simply denying refugee status or immigration to the US based on not just race, color, ethnicity, and nation, but also religion, was openly stated policy for Trump.
His infamous Muslim ban was something he put enormous effort to. It was ordered within his first week in office. Courts quickly threw it out, and he ordered a new one, trying to get around the law. The second Muslim ban was thrown out immediately as well. This process was repeated four more times. Finally, on the seventh try, a repeatedly amended version of the third Muslim ban was approved by the courts.
Trump had spent over a year and a half in court trying to keep out as many nonwhites and non Christians from the US as he could. The Muslim ban kept out tens of thousands from seven nations and disrupted travel for hundreds of thousands. It also harmed the medical health of thousands of women and unborn children. One in seven immigrants avoided health treatment, fearing it would jeopardize their legal status. Under the ban, pregnant immigrant women had more stress, higher blood pressure, and their babies were more likely to be born premature.
Premature infants are more likely to have a long list of health problems, among them anemia, asthma, respiratory distress, immature brains, cerebral palsy, mental retardation, vision and hearing problems, ADHD, SIDS, heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes. A devout Christian should be opposed to cruelty to immigrants on religious principle, but a fiscal conservative should be opposed simply because of the higher health and societal costs to the public and taxpayers.
But Trump has consistently showed himself to be neither, neither a devout man of faith nor have any interest in good business. His followers, no doubt, do mostly think of themselves as devoted believers in both Christ and low cost efficient government. But it’s obvious in this case those beliefs count less for them than their belief in a white Christian and English speaking nation free of any immigrants not white Christian or English speaking. White nationalist hatred, and the official cruelty they think necessary to enforce it, greatly outweighs their alleged Christian faith.
When Trump and his followers speak of immigrants and refugees, most of them get visibly and vocally angry, their voices rising, and their faces contorted in rage. When they talk of building walls, breaking up or tear gassing families, locking up children and pregnant women, and hear of high numbers of deaths and rapes among the interned, their faces light up with pleasure. They cheer, laugh, smirk, back slap, and pump their fists. White supremacist cruelty, and fear or a nonwhite majority, is at the hard heart of Trump and a central part of his appeal to an equally ugly and amoral set of followers.