Donald Trump painted a devastating picture of the country being “taken over” by hordes of criminal foreigners in a campaign speech on Friday, as he stepped up his efforts to make the November US election a migrant crime wave that may not be. Used to be.
With the race for the White House neck-and-neck, the Republican former president is splitting his final pitch between a protectionist economic message and angering his largely white, working-class supporters by demonizing immigrants.
As his Democratic election rival Kamala Harris promised to work with Republicans to promote a united government, Trump delivered a divisive speech like he had never given before, wildly exaggerating local tensions and raising concerns about immigration figures. And misled its audience about the policy.
“America is known throughout the world as ‘Occupied America’.” They call it ‘captured’. We are being taken over by a criminal force,” Trump thundered in an 80-minute Aurora, Colorado appearance in which Trump focused almost entirely on immigration.
Flanked by posters of foreign suspected criminals, he said, “But to everyone here in Colorado and across our country, I pledge and pledge this: November 5, 2024, will be Liberation Day in America.”
While the US government has struggled for years to manage its southern border with Mexico, Trump has raised concerns by claiming there is an “invasion” of migrants he says are raping and killing Americans. Will murder.
enemy Within’
Aurora was the scene of a viral video, played on loop in right-wing media, showing armed Latinos ransacking an apartment building.
The incident fueled widespread, false stories about Latin American immigrants terrorizing the city of Denver suburbs – thereby fueling Trump’s campaign message that the United States is overrun by people he calls “savages.” And called “animal”.
Labeling Harris a “criminal”, Trump falsely said that Venezuelan gangs were allowed to shoot at police in Colorado, and he talked vaguely about the “enemy within”, whom he referred to as “all Defined as “having to deal with the scum we hate”. Country.”
“If Harris gets a four-year term, you’ll have 200 million people…the country will be destroyed,” Trump said.
Trump vowed to tackle migrant gangs by using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — which allows the federal government to capture and deport aliens belonging to a country with which the U.S. is at war — as part of a mass deportation campaign. In what they named “Operation Aurora.”
Violent crime, which increased under Trump, has actually decreased every year of the Biden administration.
Immigrants commit proportionally less crime than the native population, although immigrant suspects have been named in some high-profile cases of violent attacks on women and children, angering many Republican voters.
Illegal immigration numbers at the southern border are now about where they were in 2020, the last year of Trump’s presidency, after peaking at 250,000 migrant crossings in December 2023.
Harris, campaigning in Scottsdale, Arizona, provided a stark contrast to Trump as she delivered a message of unity, promising to establish a “bipartisan council of advisors” in addition to having a Republican in her Cabinet.
‘Go back to where they came from’
“There have been some powerful forces in our country over the last several years that have been trying to divide us as Americans; they will appease us if we point fingers at each other,” he said. We.”
There are less than four weeks left for the November 5 election and polls suggest the election is very close. The Wall Street Journal’s latest poll Friday gives Harris a slight lead in four of seven states, but all key contests are within the margin of error.
Aurora’s police department told AFP this week that it had only isolated reports of activity in the city by Venezuelan street gang Tren de Aragua.
And the Republican mayor, Mike Coffman, called Trump’s claims “grossly exaggerated”, and offered him a tour of Aurora, which he called a “safe city – not a city taken over by Venezuelan gangs.”
However, Trump clearly believes his fear-mongering is having an impact.
He has similarly promoted a completely fictitious story that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating residents’ cats and dogs.
In Aurora, he repeated his threat to legally deport the community living in Ohio, saying, “They have to go back where they came from.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)