President Donald Trump’s obsession with proving himself somehow right in claiming Alabama would be hit by the recent Hurricane Dorian despite the state sitting well outside of forecasted impact zones has given way to a more dangerous issue. As this week got underway, accounts went viral of refugees fleeing Dorian-ravaged Bahama islands getting kicked off a boat to the United States if they didn’t have a visa. Speaking to reporters outside the White House this Monday, Trump came out with the lunatic idea that if something like that hadn’t happened — if families struggling for survival hadn’t been kicked off a boat to safety and left to continue struggling on a desolated island — there could be some danger to the United States.
Big problems on the ferry from Freeport to Florida — announcement just made that any Bahamian without a visa must now get off. This is not normal. Nornally Bahamians can travel to USA with passport and a printout of their police record. This is a mess. pic.twitter.com/DESUm2qBGE
— Brian Entin (@BrianEntin) September 8, 2019
He railed:
‘We have to be very careful. Everybody needs totally proper documentation. Because look, the Bahamas has some tremendous problems with people going to the Bahamas who weren’t supposed to be there. I don’t want to allow people that weren’t supposed to be in the Bahamas to come into the United States, including some very bad people and some very bad gang members, and some very, very bad drug dealers. So we are going to be very very strong on that.’
Trump defends prohibiting some people from hurricane-ravaged Bahamas from entering the United States because he doesn’t want “very bad people and some very bad gang members and some very very bad drug dealers” here. pic.twitter.com/BL7q93xtfD
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 9, 2019
It’s the “bad hombres” again! First, Trump kickstarted a campaign to block off an entire country with what he initially claimed would be a concrete wall because of ambiguous, ill-defined, ultimately fake threats of “bad hombres” like rapists and drug dealers sneaking into the United States through immigrant populations. Now, a group of these “hombres” have apparently sneaked all the way over to The Bahamas just to get hit by Dorian just to sneak into the United States on Trump’s watch. It takes a special kind of egomania to see some potential security-threatening conspiracy in people trying to escape areas where everything has been destroyed because of the lengthy periods of EF-5 tornado conditions.
Where are they going to get the documentation Trump is after if their entire island was essentially flattened and they’re now living in ruins???
Trump went on to croak about how “large sections of The Bahamas” were supposedly “not hit,” although on a basic level, this is a stretch at BEST, despite his insistence that refugees would be transferred to these supposedly safe areas. Dorian is one of the strongest storms to have ever hit in the Atlantic Ocean, and it quickly proved massive in size too — and the best Trump’s got is “oh, well if the people might not technically die if we move them over here, then let’s do that.”
For his part, Acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan tried to dismiss the controversy as the result of “confusion.” Although he said Temporary Protected Status hadn’t formally been granted to the refugees fleeing Dorian’s devastation, he insisted that administration members are “not working and telling a cruise line that you cannot allow anyone without documents. That’s just not being done.”
Featured Image via screenshot
