Before the morning was even over, the Tennessee eighth grader was under arrest. She was interrogated, strip-searched and spent the night in a jail cell, her mother says. Earlier in the day, her friends had teased the teen about her tanned complexion and called her “Mexican,” even though she’s not. When a friend asked what she was planning for Thursday, she wrote: “on Thursday we kill all the Mexico’s.”

What kind of state ramps up this kind of rhetoric, even fetishizes it to the point of installing a president and confessional congressional members who use it, then criminalizes children for repeating what they say, after criminalizing diversity posters in classrooms?