Emails obtained through a public records request show a Trump administration official urged federal agents to use violence against protesters during unrest tied to immigration crackdowns, according to a new report.
The messages, shared with the Los Angeles Times, involve Joseph Mazzara, a State Department employee who previously served as acting general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security.
In a June 11 email, Mazzara wrote that agents confronting demonstrators should have escalated their response, MS NOW reported Friday.
“They should have, when they brought the line in, just started hitting the rioters and arresting everyone that couldn’t get away from them,” Mazzara reportedly wrote in one email. “No one likes being hit by a stick, and people tend to run when that starts happening in earnest.”
The emails were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the watchdog group American Oversight.
MS NOW opinion columnist Ja’han Jones said the messages “speak to the culture of violent intimidation that the president has helped fuel at the Department of Homeland Security, an agency that has become a megaphone for white supremacist propaganda.”
DHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Mazzara was later appointed deputy commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
“The Trump administration’s deadly anti-immigrant crackdown became so brutal last year that even some popular figures who have supported the president compared it to Nazism,” Jones reminded readers Friday. “That reputation is only bolstered by these revelations of violent bloodlust by a top lawyer formerly tasked with advising the people waging that crackdown.”