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Besieged by questions about his war on Iran and his wife\u2019s statement on Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s decision to elevate such graphic images of a woman\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cNo one will ever forget the expression of terror on Iryna\u2019s face as she looked up at her attacker in the last seconds of her life,\u201d the president said as her mother wept in the gallery.<\/p>\n Trump also tried to present those images as an argument against immigration, by falsely describing the North Carolina-born man arrested and charged with killing Zarutska as an immigrant. \u201cShe had escaped a brutal war, only to be slain by a hardened criminal set free to kill in America came in through open borders,\u201d Trump said, incorrectly.<\/p>\n The video that Trump posted on Thursday was originally surfaced by<\/a> the Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin on Tuesday, the same day Trump was threatening to commit a war crime by bombing bomb Iran\u2019s civilian infrastructure. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a statement<\/a> that the suspected attacker in custody was \u201creleased\u201d in 2022 by the Biden administration and given temporary protected status, although it is unclear whether that information is accurate.<\/p>\n Trump has been trying to foment hatred of Haitians given temporary shelter in the US since his 2024 campaign, when he infamously made the false accusation<\/a> that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were \u201ceating the pets of the people that live there\u201d.<\/p>\n The baseless conspiracy theory about Haitian immigrants eating pets was first popularized that year by JD Vance, the Ohio senator who became Trump\u2019s vice-president. At the same time, Vance argued that Haitians who had a legal right to live and work in the US with temporary protected status should be considered \u201cillegal\u201d because the law had been abused.<\/p>\n The administration\u2019s efforts to remove temporary protected status from Haitians and other immigrants seeking safety has been blocked by multiple courts.<\/p>\n The distressing video of the murder was first posted on social media earlier on Thursday by DHS, which slightly blurred the violent attack. The department has consistently used social media images to inflame anti-immigrant sentiment amid a sweeping crackdown that has also targeted legal immigrants, with a stated goal of deporting<\/a> more than a quarter of the current US population.<\/p>\n The Fort Myers News-Press reported last week<\/a> the suspected killer, who is homeless, had attempted to withdraw cash from an ATM in the gas station and, after being unable to do so, demanded that the clerk give him cash. The following day he fatally attacked the clerk, who was an immigrant from Bangladesh, with a hammer, the outlet reported.<\/p>\n When Trump shared the brutal video, with a long caption railing against what the president wrongly called \u201ctemporary protective status\u201d, the video of the woman\u2019s last moments was not blurred.<\/p>\n Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, commented that DHS And then Trump shared the video \u201cfor exactly as vile a reason as you can imagine; basically Breitbart\u2019s old \u2018black crime\u2019 vertical as official government policy. There hasn\u2019t been an administration this openly racist since Wilson invited the KKK to the White House.\u201d<\/p>\n Reichlin-Melnick was referring to a section of the far-right website Breitbart which sowed racist hatred by focusing on violent crime committed by Black Americans and immigrants.<\/p>\n In 2019, the journalist Michael Edison Hayden obtained more than 900 emails sent to Breitbart editors in 2015 and 2016 by Stephen Miller, who is now Trump\u2019s main domestic policy adviser, urging them to focus on<\/a> violent crimes committed by people of color and immigrants.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n