2024
Elections
Trump on
immigrants: ‘We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now’
The former
president went after immigrants on Monday, linking crime to genetics.
By Emmy
Martin
10/07/2024
12:23 PM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/07/trump-immigrants-crime-00182702
Former
President Donald Trump used increasingly harsh rhetoric to attack immigrants,
suggesting on Monday during an interview that immigrants commit horrendous
crimes because “it’s in their genes.”
“How about
allowing people to come to an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers, many
of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in
the United States. You know now a murder, I believe this, it’s in their genes.
And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now,” he told conservative
radio host Hugh Hewitt.
Trump also
said Vice President Kamala Harris “wants to go into a Communist Party-type
system” to “feed people governmentally.”
Trump’s
suggestion that immigrants are predisposed to violence is an escalation of his
recent rhetoric against migrants, which he has used consistently on the
campaign trail, assuring mass deportations if he wins the presidency. But
Monday’s statement also reflects Trump’s previous anti-immigrant rhetoric,
including comments last year that “they’re poisoning the blood of our country.”
The White House condemned Trump’s statement for “echoing the grotesque rhetoric
of fascists and violent white supremacists.”
Trump
campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that the former
president was “referring to murderers, not migrants” in the interview.
“It’s pretty
disgusting the media is always so quick to defend murderers, rapists and
illegal criminals if it means writing a bad headline about President Trump,”
she said in the statement.
Last week,
he promised to remove Temporary Protected Status and deport the Haitian
migrants in Springfield, Ohio, after weeks of spreading baseless claims that
the Haitian population there was eating pets with his running mate JD Vance.
The national spotlight led to bomb threats at Springfield schools.
Harris said
Trump’s rhetoric against the migrants “has to stop” in an interview with the
National Association of Black Journalists in September.
Immigration
is an issue that resonates with voters, and it’s a vulnerability for Harris. In
a September New York Times/Siena poll of registered voters across the country,
Trump led Harris on the issue 53 percent to 42 percent. She recently made a
campaign stop in Douglas, Arizona, to call for tougher border security.
The Harris
campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump, who
has repeated the 13,000 figure before, pulled it from a letter from Immigration
and Customs Enforcement to Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales released last month.
That letter showed that 13,099 non-citizens on ICE’s “non-detained docket” were
convicted of homicide. However, that data only shows the individuals are not
detained by ICE; they are more likely in state or federal prison. And the
number of convicted criminals on that docket goes back decades.
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