From bayonets to black paint, President Donald Trump has floated a number of bizarre suggestions to secure the US-Mexico border.
Trump even wanted to shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down, according to reports from The New York Times and the Washington Post.
Many of Trump’s wilder ideas were surfaced amid a recent influx of Central American migrants during the springtime, which drove the administration into a frenzy as they sought to tamp down the numbers.
President Donald Trump has floated a number of extraordinary suggestions to fulfill his longstanding goal of halting legal and illegal immigration along the country’s southern border.
Most of his ideas have not panned out — they were either illegal, too expensive, or unrealistic to enact. But some have actually been implemented.
Many of the ideas came amid a recent crush of migrants, who arrived at the US-Mexico border in numbers not seen in 12 years. By the spring of 2019, more than 100,000 migrants were apprehended at the border each month.
Apoplectic over the rising numbers, Trump demanded a series of increasingly odd border-security measures, many of which his aides talked him out of.
Here are the most bizarre requests Trump has made to secure the border.
Shooting migrants in the legs to slow them down
Getty Images/John Moore
Trump reportedly made the gruesome request last March, and was quickly told by aides that the idea would be illegal, according to an upcoming book written by two reporters for The New York Times.
The White House did not respond to Insider’s request for comment on the suggestion, and Trump himself has not denied it.
It also wasn’t the first time he floated the idea of shooting migrants. In public, he once mused about potentially having the US military shoot caravan migrants who threw rocks.
“I hope there won’t be that, but I will tell you this — anybody throwing rocks … we will consider that a firearm, because there’s not much difference,” Trump said in November 2018.
