Florida GOP Governor Ron DeSantis is trying to nab the 2024 Republican nomination for president, and though it seems unlikely he’ll actually get there, his ideas for what he’d do if he got that nomination and then won the presidency are already troubling, to say the least.
A lot of it concerns targeting undocumented immigrants, an area in which he’s already focused during his time leading the “free state” of Florida, as self-righteous Republican clowns call it. For instance, DeSantis’s team has promoted winding down birthright citizenship, with a particular focus on those immigrant communities. Birthright citizenship is what generally provides people born in the United States with, well, citizenship, and it originates with the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which helped upend some of the horrors of slavery. DeSantis has also been promoting what is effectively just murder in cases of mild property damage at the southern border, and an expert lawyer had thoughts.
“As a legal matter, a law enforcement officer who kills someone who doesn’t pose an immediate threat is committing an act of murder. Full stop,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council recently said. “You cannot just shoot someone for trying to bring drugs into the US (also, the most common drug brought over/through the wall is weed).” DeSantis had specifically tied his support of using lethal force against individuals trying to cut through portions of the country’s physical barriers at the southern border to attempts to “poison” Americans, as he described it.
DeSantis’s rhetoric mirrors a lot else that’s been found among extremist Republicans. For instance, leading figures like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) have promoted the idea of actually taking military action that effectively targets Mexican territory in response to cartel activity and what Republicans inaccurately call an “invasion” along that southern border.
As a legal matter, a law enforcement officer who kills someone who doesn’t pose an immediate threat is committing an act of murder. Full stop. You cannot just shoot someone for trying to bring drugs into the US (also, the most common drug brought over/through the wall is weed). https://t.co/ii0D2xs14E
— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) June 29, 2023
