Outside of building a border wall, it seems Donald Trump has been optioning other methods to detain unauthorized crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border. Among them — shooting migrants in the leg.
According to The New York Times, the suggestion came during a March meeting with White House advisors. It was an escalation of ideas he had thrown out previously, but that were met with disapproval from his aides. In the past, he talked about building trenches along the wall and filling them with alligators. He also threw out the idea of placing electrical spikes on the wall that could puncture human flesh. Trump went as far as implying that those who throw rocks at the wall should be shot. Shooting them in the leg, he thought, was a logical compromise.
“The president was frustrated and I think he took that moment to hit the reset button,” Thomas D. Homan, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told The New York Times about that week in March. “The president wanted it to be fixed quickly.”
The report notes that in that meeting Trump also ordered that the border be closed, and became enraged when his staff pushed back. It led to the firing of several aides who tried to reel the deranged Commander-In-Chief back in.
“You are making me look like an idiot!” those in the room claim Trump shouted during the profanity-laced meeting. “I ran on this. It’s my issue.”
Trump also took aim at Mike Pompeo, secretary of state, and Kirstjen Nielsen, the former secretary of Homeland Security, for their handling of an issue he vowed to “correct” during his campaign. At the time, Steven Miller suggested that the entire Homeland Security Department needed an overhaul. Nielsen was out by April.
In her place, Trump brought in Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II after another interim leader was slow to embrace his ideology on what should happen to migrants at the border. Since Cuccinelli’s entrance, the government has created policies around denying immigrants green cards, developed more restrictive rules around asylum, and $3.6 billion in funding has been approved for the wall.
Also, that idea he had in March to stop the movement of people between the two countries, well according to those The Times spoke with, Trump still hasn’t let go of a complete shutdown of the border.