Human rights groups are outraged over President Donald Trump’s plan to publish a “weekly list of crimes” committed by immigrants living in sanctuary cities.
The foreboding proposal, which was part of several executive orders cracking down on immigration and refugees, is “shocking in the extreme,” Human Rights Watch said Thursday.
“This is completely consistent with Trump’s xenophobic demonizing of immigrants throughout the campaign, of course, but the idea of a public list like this—a kind of weekly hate list—is still shocking in the extreme,” the group’s European media director, Andrew Stroehlein, told the Independent. “The measures this administration has announced against immigrants in its first few days will devastate families—including U.S. citizen families, naturally—and terrorize communities across the country.”
Trump’s plan read:
All this comes despite the fact that evidence points to immigrants being less likely than non-immigrants to commit crimes in the U.S., rather than the other way around.
The language echoes Trump’s infamously xenophobic campaign rhetoric, including his first speech as a candidate in 2016 calling Mexicans criminals and rapists—and is part of a series of sweeping executive actions on immigration, including an order to start construction on a border wall and a freeze on visas to immigrants from several countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
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