Now that the government shutdown has ended, the Trump administration has turned to hard science to bolster its argument for a border wall. The proposed 2,000-mile barrier, which would bar thousands of Latin Americans from illegal entry into the United States, received timely support today, with the announcement of a breakthrough scientific discovery. According to top anthropologists at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, only United States citizens — unique among any other people on planet Earth — possess qualities identifying them as true Homo sapiens.
“I feel so clean – so human!” exclaimed Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. “Frankly, there was something sub-par about those so-called ‘people’ invading our democracy. They’re… pushy. And their screaming kids — so ungrateful for those shiny new NASA space blankets. Hurtful.”
Nielsen, who currently faces an FBI investigation for denying to Congress the existence of Trump’s policy separating immigrant families, asserted that this scientific breakthrough fully justifies the allotment of $5.7 billion for the wall.
“It totally vindicates President Trump for calling immigrants rapists, murderers, terrorists, whatevers. Given this newfound scientific data, what could you expect from these human-being-wannabes?”
The discovery was announced in Washington at ICE headquarters this morning by Assistant Director Henry Heinrich, who described it as a major paradigm shift.
“This is a real morale booster,” said Mr. Heinrich. “I’d bet my opposable thumbs on it — the ones I use for strangling. And hey, being Caucasian helps, but this isn’t a ‘master-race’ thing. Just look at all the black people in the Trump administration.”
The administration sees this as one of the few victories to emerge from the 35-day government shutdown.
“Fifty-four thousand Customs and Border Protection agents and officers had to work without pay,” Heinrich continued. “They were understandably mad as hell. But we at ICE tried to keep our family together. So during downtime, we’d hang out with the grunts and watch hours and hours of the best American TV and online video. ‘Fox and Friends.’ Breitbart. Old McCarthy HUAC hearings — when witch hunts meant something. That old silent, “The Birth of a Nation.” Anything with Ann Coulter…”
Heinrich said that, as they watched, they realized an amazing thing.
“Again and again, we saw American citizens embodying nobility, reason, self-actualization. Traits we think of as human. Conversely, non-Americans — Mexicans, Guatemalans, Hondurans, and, of course, Muslims — appeared not to have these qualities. We were stumped. So we went to the Homeland Anthropological Institute for Racial Security.
“Researchers at HAIRS went to work and, after conducting several warrantless searches, confirmed that these disgruntled government employees had stumbled onto the key to Western Civilization. To quote the study: ‘United States citizens are human beings! Everybody else is just a proto-person.’”
This reporter immediately set out to verify these findings by selecting certified American citizens and asking them how they felt about non-citizens “illegally” attempting to cross America’s southern border.
“Any idiot knows immigrants aren’t human,” said David Plunderton, who owns a string of paleo fast-food restaurants in Wichita, Kansas. “Like, I know because, when I see patrol agents on the news roughing them up and depriving them of water in the desert and tearing them from their children and throwing them into camps — I don’t care. What more proof you want?”
Interestingly, retired political science teacher and avowed liberal Helen Backford holds a similar position.
“There’s broader consensus for this science than you might think, dear,” she said. “In 2006, Congress passed the Secure Fence Act. True, it only allotted $1.4 billion to build a 700-mile wall. But then-Senators Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Charles Schumer voted for it. Even now, it looks like House Democrats, although they’re against an actual wall, will propose over $5.7 billion to enhance border security.”
What this means, speculated Backford, is that although the liberal Democratic establishment may describe Latin American immigrants as human, “we do not believe, in our hearts, that they’re our kind of human. And look, dear, if you really want a different opinion, you’re going to have to stop interviewing white people.”
Scholars predict this breakthrough — besides inspiring more and better MAGA merch — will transform academic disciplines, particularly anthropology.
“It could reconfigure the concept of evolution, itself,” surmises Dr. Wendell Bloodworth, senior fellow at The American Homunculus Foundation. “Although we still believe our species began in Africa, we’re now starting to see that those individuals who migrated north and westward across the Atlantic Ocean —who came of their own free will, and not in a slave ship — developed more advanced traits as they went. Finally, they reached the North American continent, just below Canada and above Mexico, where, around the year 1776, they became fully human.
“Those who migrated in other directions,” continued Bloodworth, “have remained essentially bipedal primates. Latin immigrants? I’m not even sure if they’re primates. We won’t really know until we can arrest more of them.”
The psychiatric field is also expected to undergo major changes in the wake of this study. Dr. Ziggy Schadenfreude, author of “I’m OK, You’re in an Immigrant Detention Camp,” observes, “Although we psychotherapists continue to encourage healthy self-concepts in our patients, we now feel that a healthy self-concept for an American citizen should be an advanced state of megalomania. Mere narcissism just won’t cut it.”
With the government shutdown at least temporarily over, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi offered President Donald Trump February 5 as the date for his State of the Union Address. Soon, at the House of Representatives, Trump will proclaim his scientifically bestowed powers over lives on this planet. To millions of exhausted Americans, fearing another government shutdown, he will proclaim his humanity.
Susie Day is the author of “Snidelines: Talking Trash to Power,” published by Abingdon Square.
