Trump Makes Heinous Deportation Joke During Turkey Pardon

Donald Trump is already making light of his administration wrongfully deporting immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

Speaking from the newly paved Rose Garden Tuesday, Trump delivered a ghastly joke while he passed out pardons to two turkeys, Gobble and Waddle.

“Instead of pardons, some of my more enthusiastic staffers were already drafting the paperwork straight to the terrorist confinement center in El Salvador,” Trump said. “And even those birds don’t want to be there, you know what I mean.”

Unlike his many other groan-worthy jokes, this one didn’t seem to elicit the slightest laugh from the White House audience.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration deported 238 Venezuelans to El Salvador’s CECOT, which is notorious for human rights abuses, even though the vast majority of those immigrants did not have criminal records. Despite the administration’s claims that the deportees were brutal gang members and “the worst of the worst,” only 32 of the deportees had actually been convicted of crimes, most of which were minor offenses such as traffic violations. The Trump administration has continued to refer to CECOT as part of a barbaric propaganda campaign to scare immigrants.

Since that scandal, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has only continued its trend of targeting immigrants who aren’t criminals. The latest disclosure from ICE revealed that 40 percent of immigrants detained at agency facilities had no criminal record at all.

Trump also cracked multiple jokes about presidential pardons, saying former President Joe Biden had “used an autopen last year for the turkey’s pardon.”

“So I have the official duty to determine, and I have determined, that last year’s turkey pardons are totally invalid,” Trump continued.

He also claimed he’d wanted to call the birds Chuck and Nancy, after former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. “But then I realized I wouldn’t be pardoning them, I would never pardon those two people,” Trump said.

It seems that Gobble and Waddle should count themselves lucky. They’re probably the first recipients of Trump’s presidential pardons who didn’t have to help make him rich.