President’s post on Truth Social is in keeping with a pattern of using shocking video to sow fear about immigration and justify mass deportation
Besieged by questions about his war on Iran and his wife’s statement on Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump tried to shift the national conversation back to his immigration crackdown by posting a graphic, distressing video of a woman in Florida being killed last week by a man he described as an illegal immigrant from Haiti.
The video, taken by a surveillance camera outside a Fort Myers gas station, showed a man identified by authorities as a Haitian immigrant using a hammer to bludgeon to death the woman, who was reportedly a clerk at the gas station.
Trump’s decision to elevate such graphic images of a woman’s death by posting it for his millions of followers on Truth Social was startling, but in keeping with a pattern of using shocking video of violence attributed to undocumented immigrants to sow fear about immigration and justify mass deportation.
In his State of the Union address in January, when Trump introduced the mother of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian woman who was murdered on camera in Charlotte, North Carolina, last year, he dwelled on the gory images. “No one will ever forget the expression of terror on Iryna’s face as she looked up at her attacker in the last seconds of her life,” the president said as her mother wept in the gallery.
