Donald Trump said on Monday that illegal immigrants were bringing “bad genes” to the United States, doubling down on previous inflammatory rhetoric about immigrants poisoning the country’s bloodstream.
Trump was criticizing his Democratic presidential rival Vice President Kamala Harris in a radio interview when she presented government figures showing that there were 13,000 immigrants in the United States who were in federal immigration detention despite murder convictions. Were not.
He told conservative host Hugh Hewitt, “How about allowing people to come over the open border, 13,000 of whom were murderers, many of them killing more than one person? They’re now living happily in the United States. “
“Now you know, being a killer – I believe it – it’s in their genes. There are a lot of bad genes in our country right now. They had 425,000 people come to our country who shouldn’t have been here. Criminals. “
Trump was falsifying the data released by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency in September.
The figures do not include people imprisoned outside ICE facilities – for example, in state, local or other federal facilities – and they cover a period of decades, including the time Trump was president.
Apprehensions of migrants at the US-Mexico border dropped 75 percent year-on-year in September – to the lowest level since the Trump administration, US media reported on Monday, citing Department of Homeland Security data.
Conservative political commentator Richard Hanania, president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, said, “I don’t generally defend Trump’s statements, and here he drops the lie of 13,000 released murderers.”
“But he is right that crime is largely genetic. He should learn about the low crime rates among immigrants and think about its implications.”
Trump, who is neck-and-neck with Harris in nationwide and swing-state polling ahead of the November election, has spent much of his campaign denigrating both undocumented immigrants and those living legally in the United States. Have spent.
During a rally last month, the 78-year-old former reality TV star said Harris should be prosecuted over President Joe Biden’s border policies and called illegal immigrants “animals” who “rape, plunder, steal, plunder.” And murdering.
He said, “They’ll walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.”
And he repeatedly threatened legal Haitian residents in Ohio with deportation, falsely accusing them of eating locals’ pets.
Trump – the oldest major party White House candidate in history and the first convicted felon to run for office – accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country” in December in a phrase that drew comparisons to him to Adolf Hitler.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
