Trump posts graphic video of woman’s killing in Florida

Besieged by questions about his war on Iran and his wife’s statement on Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump 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.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.Trump’s decision to elevate such graphic images of a woman’s 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.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. “No one will ever forget the expression of terror on Iryna’s face as she looked up at her attacker in the last seconds of her life,” the president said as her mother wept in the gallery.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. “She had escaped a brutal war, only to be slain by a hardened criminal set free to kill in America came in [sic] through open borders,” Trump said.The video that Trump posted on Thursday was originally surfaced by the Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin on Tuesday, the same day Trump was threatening to commit a war crime by bombing Iran’s civilian infrastructure. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a statement that the suspected attacker in custody was “released” in 2022 by the Biden administration and given temporary protected status, although it is unclear whether that information is accurate.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 that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were “eating the pets of the people that live there”.The baseless conspiracy theory about Haitian immigrants eating pets was first popularized that year by JD Vance, the Ohio senator who became Trump’s 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 “illegal” because the law had been abused.The administration’s efforts to remove temporary protected status from Haitians and other immigrants seeking safety has been blocked by multiple courts.The distressing video of the murder was first posted on social media earlier on Thursday by the 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 more than a quarter of the current US population.The Fort Myers News-Press reported last week the suspected killer, who is unhoused, had attempted to withdraw cash from an ATM in the gas station convenience store 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.Samir Syed, president of the Bangladeshi American Society of South West Florida, told the Guardian that the victim’s name was Yasmin Nilufar. She had been living in the US for about 30 years, he said, and was survived by two teenage daughters.When Trump shared the brutal video, with a long caption railing against what the president wrongly called “temporary protective status”, the video of the woman’s last moments was not blurred.Trump did not mention the victim’s name, but, as Pablo Manríquez observed on his Migrant Insider Substack, “the President of the United States turned her death into content”.Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, commented that the DHS and then Trump shared the video “for exactly as vile a reason as you can imagine; basically Breitbart’s old ‘black crime’ vertical as official government policy. There hasn’t been an administration this openly racist since Wilson invited the KKK to the White House.”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.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’s main domestic policy adviser, urging them to focus on violent crimes committed by people of color and immigrants.