Philadelphia mayor calls Trump a ‘bully' for ending immigration protections
The mayor of Philadelphia in the US state of Pennsylvania has attacked President Donald Trump, calling him a “punk,” a “bully” over his administration’s decision to end the temporary protective status of Haitians and other immigrants.
“I don’t know where he was raised, but his family didn’t do a good job raising that guy,” Jim Kenney said on Wednesday.
Kenney called Trump’s immigration policies “un-American,” and demanded that the president leave the country himself.
On Monday, the US Department of Homeland Security terminated the temporary protected status (TPS) of nearly 60,000 Haitians who had left their country following a devastating earthquake that struck the island in 2010.
The Trump administration has already canceled the protection program for Sudanese and Nicaraguan immigrants. The TPS was launched to give people of nine war-ravaged or natural disaster-hit countries permission to live and work in the US without fear of deportation.
“Could you imagine if they ended TPS for the Irish when we came here in the 1800s? Sent us all back home to starve?” Kenney responded to the administration’s decision to terminate the program.
The US was a country of caring and compassion, the mayor went on, but it’s “now a country of anger and divisiveness, and Donald Trump has gotten us where we are.”
“There’s no compassion whatsoever in the White House,” Kenney said during a City Hall speech in Philadelphia. “I'm just beside myself with sadness because our president is a bully, our president is a punk, and he just doesn't get it.”
Trump’s immigration policies have sparked protests both inside the US and abroad since he took office in January.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump characterized Mexican migrants living in the US as murderers and rapists and said the US would build a wall on the US-Mexico border to keep illegal immigrants from entering the country.
The Trump administration has also been in a legal battle over his temporary travel ban on people from several Muslim-majority countries.
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