Former President Donald Trump stepped up his tough rhetoric on immigration on Saturday, accusing Vice President Kamala Harris and the Biden administration of welcoming criminals into the country and warning that without mass deportations, the US will lose its “culture.”
Speaking to a crowd in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, Trump on Friday slammed Harris’ visit to the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona, vowing to go even further than President Joe Biden in cracking down on illegal immigration. Flanked by posters with images of migrants convicted of crimes, Trump painted a grim vision of a US overrun by violent “terrorists,” calling Harris “mentally retarded” and claiming the Biden administration’s border policy is “a treason to the American nation’.
‘You have to bring these people back to where they came from. You have no choice. You’re going to lose your culture, you’re going to lose your country, you’re going to have a crime like no one has ever seen before,” Trump said, acknowledging that the speech was particularly “dark” even by his standards.
The speech was a direct response to Harris’s more aggressive stance on the border — and a reinforcement of an issue that has long animated Trump’s base. Opinion polls show that immigration is a strong point for him in the election with Harris.
On Saturday, Trump depicted Whitewater, Wisconsin, as a “small, very nice town” being “flooded” by an influx of migrants, echoing the rhetoric he used to describe Springfield, Ohio, and Aurora, Colorado, as victims of an ‘invasion of migrants’. .”
“If Kamala is re-elected, your city, and every city like it, across Wisconsin and across our country – the heartland, the coast, it doesn’t matter – will be transformed into a Third World hellhole,” he said. .
In a statement to POLITICO, Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said Trump “has nothing ‘inspirational’ to offer the American people, only darkness.”
Trump and his allies have used new data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement in recent days, targeting Harris on the 425,000 undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions who are not in federal custody and living in the United States. The former president has said these migrants were allowed into the country under the Biden administration, but DHS data from recent years shows Trump’s statement to be misleading.
The majority of these individuals with criminal convictions were already on the non-incarcerated roll and living in the United States before Biden took office. As of June 2021, there were 405,786 convicted criminals on the non-incarcerated list, meaning that number has increased by less than 5 percent since Biden became president. Before Trump won the White House in 2016, this number stood at 368,000 in April of that year – a figure that would increase by more than 37,000 in June 2021.
Of the approximately 647,000 total undetained undocumented immigrants on ICE’s docket – categorized as convicted criminals or awaiting pending criminal charges – approximately 152,000 are for violent crimes, including murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. The figures also include non-violent and petty crime: 126,000 involve traffic offences, while 92,000 involve immigration-related crimes (such as crossing the border illegally).
And while migrant crime has been a focal point of the 2024 race — a problem exacerbated by cases of American women and girls allegedly killed in the country illegally by immigrants — studies have shown that migrants are no more likely to commit crimes commit than US-born Americans. . Yet Trump has promoted falsehoods about immigrant communities, including the conspiracy theory that Haitian migrants ate dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio.
“Kamala has allowed more than 20 million criminals into the country because anyone who crosses the border illegally and breaks the laws of our country is, by definition, a criminal,” Karoline Leavitt, Trump campaign national press secretary, said in a statement to POLITICO. “Kamala wants to grant mass amnesty to rapists, murderers and other violent illegal monsters. President Trump will begin the largest mass deportation in history on day one.”
Trump himself is a convicted felon, having been found guilty earlier this year of 34 charges of falsifying company records to cover up a hush money payment to a porn star. He was also found liable for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll and is banned from operating businesses in New York State after being found liable for massive corporate fraud. And Trump has been charged in three other cases accusing him of widespread criminal conduct before, during and after his presidency.
