Canadian woman accused of slapping Trump-supporting teen turned over to ICE

A teenager wears a Trump hat to the boardwalk and gets slapped for it. That's the whole story, really, before anyone gets to the immigration angle. A grown woman decided a kid's clothing choice justified putting hands on him, and if the hat had said something else entirely, we doubt this would have happened at all. That's worth sitting with regardless of what happened to her afterward.

Now she's a Canadian national in ICE custody, which is the part everyone wants to argue about. Fine, argue about it. But the outrage some are performing over her deportation status is oddly quiet about the actual assault that got her there. You don't get to skip the "she hit a minor" part and jump straight to "but is this proportional." It's proportional. Assault a kid, and depending on your immigration status, you might not get to stick around and do it again.

This is also a small, ugly preview of what a lot of MAGA kids have been living with for a decade now. Wear the wrong shirt at the wrong beach and someone twice your age might decide you deserve to be hit for it. We've watched commentators spend years excusing that instinct as "punching up" or whatever the rationalization of the month is. It isn't. It's an adult assaulting a teenager over a hat, and the fact that ICE got involved doesn't change what started it.