Updated November 3, 2020 Civil Rights
Critical Rights and Rule-of-Law Concern
MS-13 'Animals' and Dehumanizing Rhetoric: Using Gang Labels to Target Immigrant Communities
Trump's use of 'animals' to describe MS-13 members — and his conflation of the gang label with immigrants broadly — followed the same pattern documented in incitement to ethnic violence: dehumanization of a group, followed by calls for harsh treatment. Scholars of political violence noted the specific language echoed anti-Tutsi propaganda before the Rwandan genocide and Nazi propaganda before the Holocaust. Trump used similar dehumanizing framing for other immigrant groups, describing Central American migrants as an 'infestation' and an 'invasion.'