President Donald Trump began his presidential campaign in 2015, describing Mexican immigrants as "rapists" and "murderers."
Though there's no evidence to support a connection between undocumented immigrants and violent crime, the President gleefully uses murders committed by undocumented immigrants to drum up a fear of all undocumented immigrants.
It appears that tradition doesn't stop with Donald Trump.
On the seventh night of Hanukkah, a man wielding a machete-like weapon stabbed five people at a rabbi's home as part of an anti-semitic attack in Monsey, New York.
According to the Acting Director of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, Ken Cuccinelli, in a now-deleted tweet, this attack happened due to an immigration law from the 1980s. That law was signed by Republican President and GOP icon Ronald Reagan.
Cuccinelli said in the tweet:
"The attacker is the US Citizen son of an illegal alien who got amnesty under the 1986 amnesty law for illegal immigrants. Apparently, American values did not take hold among this entire family, at least this one violent, and apparently bigoted, son."
Cuccinelli's assertion that it was a lack of "American values" responsible for the man's anti-semitism was bizarre at best. Despite racist and xenophobic attacks committed in Charlottesville, El Paso, and elsewhere this year by American citizens, Cuccinelli seemed determined to drum up more fear and hatred of immigrants. The suspect in the Monsey, New York attack has been identified as Grafton Thomas, an American citizen with roots in Ghana, Africa.
People weren't having it.
It was not lost on people that Cuccinelli chalked this attack up to immigration and "American values" since it's a black attacker, while many Republicans continue to minimize a growing number of massacres committed in the name of white nationalist ideologies.
Cuccinelli has yet to address the deleted tweet.
@realDonaldTrump/Truth Social; @TrumpDailyPosts/X
The Orlando Sentinel
