As a caravan of asylum seekers from Central America moves through Mexico—getting within about 1,000 miles of the United States—Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen got all warm and cuddly about how there is no “intention right now to shoot at people.” Mind you, these are people approaching openly and planning to apply for asylum, many of whom have already dropped off of the caravan to apply for asylum in Mexico. So why is Nielsen openly considering the possibility of shooting them? Because Fox News explicitly asked about it if people tried to “force their way” through.
"We do not have any intention right now to shoot at people. They will be apprehended, however," she said. "But I also take my officer and agents, their own personal safety, extraordinarily seriously. They do have the ability of course to defend themselves."
These are people fleeing violence in their home countries, violence that came about in part as a result of U.S. policy over the years. Many of them are families with children, and again, they are approaching openly hoping to legally apply for asylum. If the Trump administration keeps the legal ports of entry closed to block them illegally, some may find other ways to cross to present themselves as asylum seekers, but the thought that they would somehow try to confront heavily armed U.S. officials and storm the gates of the United States is ludicrous—except in the fearful racist minds of Fox News viewers, and it’s for them that the question was asked and Nielsen answered. Fear is the point here.
So we get Nielsen saying only that “right now” there aren’t plans to shoot parents and children who are already in fear for their lives. And “they will be apprehended” as they try to do a legal thing that the Trump administration illegally plans to prevent them from doing.
Fox News is intentionally ramping up the rhetoric of threat and fear and Nielsen is going right along with it, looking for credit for not planning “right now” to shoot these vulnerable people as if that’s some morally heroic act of forbearance as opposed to a grotesque insinuation intended to excite racists into further hate.
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