Former President Trump is turning to familiar terrain as he gears up for the general election campaign against President Biden, escalating his attacks on migrants coming into the country and warning of calamitous consequences at the border if Biden is reelected.
Trump has for years used incendiary rhetoric about immigrants to fire up his base, but in recent weeks he has turned up the intensity even more, warning about “migrant crime” and making dubious claims about migrants speaking languages “nobody has ever heard of.”
Several recent polls have shown immigration at or near the top of the list of concerns for voters as they weigh their choices in November. Trump has been eager to make migration central to the general election debate, visiting the U.S.-Mexico border on the same day as Biden late last month.
“The more people learn about this issue, the more they get pissed off,” said Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist.
“Regardless of the verbiage being used, it drives home the point that Biden is not putting Americans first,” he added.
Trump has made inflammatory statements about immigration dating back to his 2016 campaign launch, when he ran on the idea of building a wall along the southern border and suggested Mexico was sending rapists and criminals across the border into the U.S. He has not shied away from that type of rhetoric in the years since, and he once again is leaning into provocative language.
Trump drew comparisons to Nazi leaders when he said in December that immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the country.
Almost every Trump speech now features a riff about “migrant crime,” a category Trump tells supporters he has branded himself to refer to violence by those who came into the country illegally.
He has repeatedly referenced a viral incident from early February, in which migrants were recorded brawling with police officers 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 become another flashpoint in the debate over border security.
During a February speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump tested out what has become a common talking point: That migrants are speaking unknown languages.
“We have languages coming into our country. We don’t have one instructor in our entire nation that can speak that language,” Trump told the crowd of supporters. “These are languages — it’s the craziest thing — they have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a very horrible thing.”
When asked about the comments, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung told NBC News that the former president’s point was “there are migrants invading from countries that we know nothing about.”
Trump routinely claims there are “millions” of migrants coming into the U.S. from jails, prisons and mental institutions. During a conversation with Fox News host Sean Hannity last week, the two men agreed the surge in migration could lead to “a big attack at some point.”
At a North Carolina rally ahead of Super Tuesday, Trump said Biden’s border policies amounted to “a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America.”
During a conversation with Right Side Broadcasting before Tuesday’s primaries, Trump went so far as to claim, without evidence, that the surge in migration has overrun New York City to the point that “there’s no more Little Leagues. There’s no more sports. There’s no more life in New York and so many of these cities.”
A website for Little League baseball in New York City indicates registration for the spring is underway.
A New York City Education Department spokesperson told ChalkBeat that Trump’s assertions that students in the city have been displaced by migrants were also…
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