Peter Fonda has officially apologized for his tweets about Barron Trump on Wednesday morning.
The actor has been voicing his outrage about the family separation at the U.S. border for days on his Twitter account. On Wednesday, many thought he took it too far when he posted about 12-year-old Barron Trump. Fonda suggested that he should be ripped “from his mother’s arms and put… in a cage with pedophiles.”
Videos by PopCulture.com
The tweet drew harsh criticism and even frightened first lady Melania Trump into calling the secret service on him, according to a report by The Hill.
A representative for Fonda apologized for the since-deleted tweet on Wednesday while speaking with reporters from The Blast.
“I tweeted something highly inappropriate and vulgar about the president and his family in response to the devastating images I was seeing on television,” read a statement from the 78-year-old actor.
“Like many Americans, I am very impassioned and distraught over the situation with children separated from their families at the border, but I went way too far. It was wrong and I should not have done it. I immediately regretted it and sincerely apologize to the family for what I said and any hurt my words have caused.”
That was not the only tweet that landed Fonda in hot water. The actor made several suggestive posts — many of which have since been deleted — that even his followers thought had crossed a line. In another one, Fonda proposed that protesters surround ICE agents and their families at home and at school as a tactic of shaming and intimidating them.
“WE SHOULD HACK THIS SYTEM, GET THE ADDRESSES OF THE ICE AGENTS CBP AGENTS AND SURROUND THEIR HOMES IN PROTEST,” he wrote. “WE SHOULD FIND OUT WHAT SCHOOLS THEIR CHILDREN GO TO AND SURROUND THE SCHOOLS IN PROTEST. THESE AGENTS ARE DOING THIS CUZ THEY WANT TO DO IT. THEY LIKE DOING THIS. F—.”
While Fonda’s tweets were condemned, they got little attention in the wake of the atrocities he was reacting to. The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy on immigration has now detained more than 2,000 children in under two months, with no protocol in place to reunite them with their parents.
The president announced on Wednesday that he would sign an executive order to end the policy, which is unnecessary as it is not based on a law and was only enacted by his Justice Department last month.
