Trump shares video of brutal Florida killing allegedly by Haitian immigrant
President Donald Trump shared a video of a deadly attack allegedly by a Haitian immigrant accused of bludgeoning a woman with a hammer at a Florida gas station, portraying the killing as justification for his administration’s mass deportation agenda.
Rolbert Joachin, was arrested and charged with killing a woman on April 2 in Fort Myers, about 160 miles northwest of Miami. Authorities said the man was from Haiti and arrived in the US in 2022. The woman who was killed was identified as a 51-year-old immigrant from Bangladesh and a mother of two adult daughters. Trump, who posted the video late Thursday to his Truth Social account, has often sought to portray immigrants as bringing crime to the US, and the video emerging from the Florida attack presented him with a new, particularly graphic opportunity to do so.
Trump also often paints Democrats and his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, as allowing in immigrants who posed a criminal or national security threat to the US.
“The video of her brutal slaying is one of the most vicious things you will ever see,” Trump said in his post, describing the man as an “animal.”
Critics say the president unjustly paints all immigrants as criminals in an effort to bolster his immigration agenda, when studies have found that people living in the US illegally are less likely than native-born Americans to have been arrested for violent, drug and property crimes. “Our hearts are with the family of the victim during this unimaginably painful time,” said Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, which advocates for Haitian immigrants. “We condemn this act of violence in the strongest possible terms.
