Donald Trump has declared an all-out war on immigrant families, and the number of casualties is growing exponentially. Fifty thousand Hondurans, the most recent victims of his administration’s deceit and cruelty, will lose their Temporary Protected Status (TPS) despite having lived in the U.S. since 1999.

It is a war alright and, ironically, this is the first time in his life the tough talking Trump has been involved in anything remotely associated with the word “war.” For all his macho swagger and bluster, the fact is that he stayed comfortably at home while thousands of young men like him were fighting and dying in the jungles of Viet Nam. Prefiguring already what his modus operandi would be later in life, “the Donald” managed to be diagnosed with bone spurs in his heels, which served an excuse –ridiculous as it sounds—to get a deferment, one of five Trump received during Vietnam. The others were for education, which sounds even more ridiculous.

Of course, persecuting, harassing, incarcerating and sending back thousands of powerless families to suffer violence, poverty torture or even death, doesn’t require a lot of courage of the kind the young Trump would have needed to display in South Asia, but was devoid of. A war against defenseless men, women and children, that’s the kind Trump prefers.

Sorry to say it, but back in January, when the Salvadorans were deprived of their TPS, this writer encouraged Honduras and Guatemala not to believe any promises Trump could make in exchange for their support at the U.N.

“200,000 Salvadorans, 2,500 Nicaraguans, 45,000 Haitians, 9,000 Nepalese and now 50,000 Hondurans, are the latest victims of the Trump Administration's campaign against legal immigration,” reports Yamily Habib in Al Día News. Notice that Habib specifies this is part of Washington’s campaign against legal immigrants, which is what those granted TPS are.

All these decisions by the Trump administration are hurtful, but the case of Honduras is even more so. The reason? The Central American nation’s controversial president, Juan Orlando Hernández, had shamefully pulled out all the stops in his abject subservience to Trump’s whims hoping to win Washington’s favor and special consideration. So much so that his country was one of only eight (along with Guatemala, Israel, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau and Togo) out of 193-member states that voted in December at the U.N. General Assembly for Trump’s provocative decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. 

Consistent with the Trump administration’s shameless habit of lying, the US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, who traveled to Honduras in February, told Hernández that Washington stood fully behind him. President Donald Trump’s government was “committed” to Hernández and his administration, Haley told Hernández. So much for Trump’s commitment.

Sorry to say it, but back in January, when the Salvadorans were deprived of their TPS, this writer encouraged Honduras and Guatemala not to believe any promises Trump could make in exchange for their support at the U.N.

“Whatever other reasons they may have to embark in such a treacherous move, the most immediate concern for both Guatemala and Honduras –also devastated by poverty and violence-- is to ingratiate themselves with Trump’s racist administration to avoid the deportation of their people. Good luck with that,” I wrote at the time.

Well, luck wasn’t so good, and González was taken for a ride by the White House con man, for whom truth is as foreign a concept as values, principles and compassion.

That’s why the November 6 midterm elections are so important. That’s why no one can stay at home that day. That’s why you must register to be able to exercise your right to vote.

Let’s throw the bums out.