A middle school student in Missouri was attacked by a group of classmates for wearing a hat emblazoned with President Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan.
Gavin Cortina, 12, who is in the Parkway School District in western St. Louis County, was confronted Wednesday on a bus ride over Trump's proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, local television station KMOV reported over the weekend.
Cell phone footage provided to KMOV shows the confrontation quickly escalating from a heated argument over President Trump's immigration policy to the 12-year-old boy being shoved against a bus window. Punches appear to be thrown in the video as well.
"At one point he just got so frustrated that he pushed me," Cortina said of the incident. "And then he kept hitting me and backing me up to like my window of the bus and so I just had to push him out."
"As a parent it's so upsetting," said Christina Cortina, the boy's mother. "I feel like my son was made an example of, it was a tricky situation, it was politically charged."
All of the students involved have faced punishment, including the victim of the attack, who was suspended from school.
"I saw him being persecuted for having an opinion of his own. I saw him being berated and bullied and beat, literally beat, because he feels strongly about the world today," Christina Cortina said.