A Republican congressman provoked a hail of shock after posting a racist assault on Haitian immigrants on social media, which he subsequently deleted amid requires him to be censured.
Clay Higgins used his congressional X account to repeat debunked accusations – unfold by Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee – about Haitians consuming pets and broadened the assault to name them “thugs” and model Haiti as “the nastiest nation within the Western hemisphere”.
“These Haitians are wild. Consuming pets, vudu, nastiest nation within the western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters,” the Louisiana consultant posted, purportedly in response to a authorized motion filed in opposition to Trump and his working mate, JD Vance, by a non-profit group representing Haitians in Springfield, Ohio.
“However damned in the event that they don’t really feel all refined now, submitting costs in opposition to our President and VP. All these thugs higher get their thoughts proper and their ass out of our nation earlier than January twentieth.”
The vitriolic publish adopted a pledge by Trump – who has doubled down on his baseless pet-eating allegations, which he first voiced at this month’s debate with Kamala Harris – to get Haitians “the hell out of Springfield”, though most members of the neighborhood within the metropolis are within the US legally.
It drew widespread condemnation from Home Democrats, with the occasion’s Congressional Black caucus tabling a movement to censure Higgins.
“Rep. Clay Higgins’ vile & hateful remarks abt Haitians are unacceptable. At present, it’s Haitians, however who will it’s tomorrow?” the caucus posted on its X account.
Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic Home minority chief, known as Higgins’s publish “disgusting … vile, racist and beneath the dignity of the US Home of Representatives.
Higgins was “an election-denying, conspiracy-peddling racial arsonist who’s a shame to the folks’s Home” who “should be held accountable for dishonorable conduct that’s unbecoming to a member of Congress”, Jeffries wrote.
Higgins deleted the publish after being approached by Mike Johnson, the Republican Home speaker and a fellow Louisianian. However the congressman didn’t apologise and later informed CNN that he stood by it.
Johnson – who has appointed Higgins to a taskforce investigating makes an attempt to assassinate Trump – informed journalists that after talking with him, Higgins “prayed about it and he regretted it and he pulled the publish down.
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“That’s what you need the gentleman to do,” Johnson added.
The GOP Home majority chief, Steve Scalise, rejected the censure movement, arguing it was pointless as a result of the publish had been deleted.
A former captain in a Louisiana sheriff’s workplace, Higgins was pressured to resign in 2016 after he described members of a predominantly Black gang as “animals” in a video that went viral. He received his Home seat months later.
A Washington Publish report on the time known as him a “God-fearing man of the regulation with a deep southern drawl” whose no-nonsense, tough-talking method had earned him folk-hero standing.
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