President Trump’s latest move will be an attempt to manipulate public opinion to the detriment of both legal and undocumented immigrants.
Along with beginning the construction of the border wall that Donald Trump repeatedly promised on the campaign trail, his administration will start publishing a weekly list of crimes committed by immigrants, according to language in one of the executive orders Trump signed Wednesday.
While President Trump is already defunding the top 10 sanctuary cities — cities that have promised to resist deportation orders from the federal government — to the tune of $2.27 billion, his executive order goes a bit further in demonizing the cities taking a stand against his immigration policy:
“To better inform the public regarding the public safety threats associated with sanctuary jurisdictions, the Secretary [of the Department of Homeland Security] shall utilize the Declined Detainer Outcome Report or its equivalent and, on a weekly basis, make public a comprehensive list of criminal actions committed by aliens and any jurisdiction that ignored or otherwise failed to honor any detainers with respect to such aliens,” the order reads.
The “Declined Detainer Outcome Report” mentioned in the order references a document produced by the Department of Homeland Security, which details the cities and states that have declined detainment orders sent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). According to the aforementioned paragraph, Trump is apparently instructing Gen. John Kelly, who was recently confirmed as the next Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, to assemble a weekly report of crimes allegedly committed by immigrants in cities resisting ICE detainment orders.
As The Independent noted, such a report is not unlike the “Black Crime” vertical on white nationalist site Breitbart.com, formerly run by Steve Bannon, who has since left the site to become Donald Trump’s chief White House strategist. The vertical chronicles crimes committed by African Americans to manipulate its readers into thinking black people commit more violent crime than white people, despite the fact that violent crime is actually down, and that white people commit far more crimes than any other race in America.
The order was also ambiguous in how the weekly crime report was to gather its information, and left the door open for crimes committed by legal immigrants to be included by not explicitly stating that only data regarding undocumented immigrants was to be used for the report.
Tom Cahill is a writer for US Uncut based in the Pacific Northwest. He specializes in coverage of political, economic, and environmental news. You can contact him via email at [email protected], or follow him on Facebook.
