· Oct. 1, 2019
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o WASHINGTON — The Oval Office meeting this past March began, as so many had, with President Trump fuming about migrants. But this time he had a solution. As White House advisers listened astonished, he ordered them to shut down the entire 2,000-mile border with Mexico — by noon the next day.
The advisers feared the president’s edict would trap American tourists in Mexico, strand children at schools on both sides of the border and create an economic meltdown in two countries. Yet they also knew how much the president’s zeal to stop immigration had sent him lurching for solutions, one more extreme than the next.
Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh. After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down. That’s not allowed either, they told him.
“The president was frustrated and I think he took that moment to hit the reset button,” said Thomas D. Homan, who had served as Mr. Trump’s acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, recalling that week in March. “The president wanted it to be fixed quickly.”
Mr. Trump’s order to close the border was a decision point that touched off a frenzied week of presidential rages, round-the-clock staff panic and far more White House turmoil than was known at the time. By the end of the week, the seat-of-the-pants president had backed off his threat but had retaliated with the beginning of a purge of the aides who had tried to contain him.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/us/politics/trump-border-wars.html
The president has a long history of violent rhetoric about immigrants. In November 2018, Trump said soldiers stationed at the border should be able to “fight back” by opening fire if migrants threw rocks at them.
“They want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “I told them to consider it a rifle. When they throw rocks like what they did to the Mexican military and police, I say consider it a rifle.”
The president has consistently described migrants as criminals, gang members and rapists, and has described their attempts to cross the border as an “invasion.”
Trump’s comments have received renewed scrutiny in the wake of a shooting in El Paso, Texas, in August that killed more than 20 people and left dozens injured. The shooter said he was targeting Mexicans and had posted a racist manifesto online railing against the influx of migrants to the U.S.
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