Former President Trump is turning to familiar territory as he prepares for a general election battle with President Biden, escalating attacks on migrants entering the country and threatening to close the border if Biden is re-elected. It warns of dire consequences.
President Trump has long used inflammatory rhetoric about immigrants to galvanize his support base, but has intensified in recent weeks, warning of “immigration crimes” and calling immigrants “something no one has ever heard.” He makes dubious claims that he speaks a language that does not exist.
Several recent polls show immigration is at or near the top of voters’ list of concerns as they weigh their choices in November. Mr. Trump is keen to make immigration a central issue in the general election, visiting the U.S.-Mexico border on the same day as Mr. Biden late last month.
“The more people know about this issue, the angrier they get,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell.
“Regardless of the language used, it highlights that Mr. Biden is not putting the American people first,” he added.
President Trump has made inflammatory statements about immigration since the start of his 2016 election campaign, when he proposed building a wall along the southern border and encouraging Mexico to keep rapists and criminals off the border. He suggested that they were crossing the border and sending them to the United States. Since then, he has turned to provocative language again.
President Trump said in December that immigrants were “tainting the blood” of the country, drawing comparisons to Nazi leaders.
Nearly all of President Trump’s speeches now include references to “immigration crimes,” and he often tells his supporters that he is referring to violence committed by illegal immigrants, a category he has decided to refer to. There is.
he repeatedly mentioned viral incident Since early February, migrants have been recorded scuffling with police in Times Square. And the death last month of Georgia college student Laken Riley, who authorities say was killed by a Venezuelan man who entered the country illegally in 2022, has sparked a new debate over border security.
In a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, President Trump tapped into a common talking point: immigrants speaking unknown languages.
“We have a lot of different languages coming into our country. There’s not a single teacher in America who speaks that language,” President Trump told the crowd. “These are languages - that’s the craziest thing – we have a language that no one in this country has ever heard of. It’s so scary.”
Asked about the comment, Trump campaign spokesman Stephen Chan told NBC News that the former president’s argument was that “immigrants are coming in from countries we know nothing about.”
President Trump regularly claims that “millions” of immigrants enter the United States from prisons, prisons, and psychiatric hospitals. In a conversation with Fox News host Sean Hannity last week, both men agreed that the surge in immigration could lead to “someday a big attack.”
At a rally in North Carolina ahead of Super Tuesday, President Trump said Biden’s border policies constituted a “conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America.”
In a conversation with Right Side Broadcast before Tuesday’s primary, Trump went so far as to claim, without evidence, that New York City has “no more Little League” due to a surge in immigration. No more sports. New York and many of these cities just don’t have the energy anymore. ”
a little league baseball website New York City indicates spring registration is underway.
New York City Department of Education spokesperson He told ChalkBeat: President Trump’s claim that the city’s students were being displaced by immigrants was also false.
The Biden campaign has been harshly critical of President Trump’s rhetoric and policy proposals on immigration, including mass deportations led by local police. A spokesperson for the Biden campaign criticized Trump’s proposal, calling it “racist, un-American and ineffective.” Cheap politics as usual at a time when the American people are demanding action from their elected officials. ”
Polls show immigration is a top priority for many Americans as focus shifts from the primary process to the expected showdown between Trump and Biden in the general election. The Associated Press reported in January that there were more than 3 million cases pending in immigration courts and record levels of insecurity at the southern border by the end of 2023.
A Gallup poll released at the end of February found that 28% of Americans say immigration is the country’s biggest problem, up 8 points from January.
In a Jan. 31 Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll of voters in seven battleground states, 61% said Biden was at least partly responsible for the surge of migrants at the southern border; 52% of respondents said they trust Trump more than Biden on immigration issues.
Earlier this week, former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki and MSNBC host Rachel Maddow laughed at the idea that immigration was a top issue for Virginia voters on Super Tuesday. The exchange went viral, with Trump’s aides and other Republicans pointing to it as evidence of a disconnect between Democrats and voters who believe immigration affects their safety and economic status.
Jason Miller, a senior Trump campaign adviser, said Psaki’s comments were “disgusting” and emblematic of the disconnect among Democrats on the issue.
“This is why Democrats lose general elections,” Miller said on Fox News. “I want our panelists to look into the eyes of Laken Riley’s parents and say the same thing. Tell them that. To the people who have been hurt by this Joe Biden crisis, he has committed suicide at the southern border.” Please say that it was created by the act of
Mr. Biden and the White House have been on the offensive in recent weeks on border security, particularly trying to shift the blame for Mr. Trump’s opposition to a bipartisan immigration bill to potential Republican nominees.
President Trump urged Republicans to oppose the bill, which was authored by Sens. James Lankford (R-Okla.), Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). urged. It would give the federal government temporary power to expel immigrants if their average daily number of crossings exceeds a set threshold, end “catch-and-release,” and raise standards for asylum screening. It was supposed to be. Trump argued that passing the bill would have a negative political impact on the Republican Party.
Biden vowed to remind voters that Trump is to blame for the border being “unsecure.” The president made his opposition to the border bill a major part of Thursday’s State of the Union address, seeking to draw a sharp contrast with his predecessor.
“What I will not do is this: I will not demonize immigrants as, as he has said in his own words, ‘tainting the blood of our nation,'” Biden continued. “I’m not going to separate families. I’m not going to ban people from America because of their faith.”
“We have a simple choice: fight our borders or fix them,” he added. “I’m ready to fix that.”
Copyright 2024 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
