Former President Donald Trump continues to make the headlines due to his anti-immigrant rhetoric, now linking murders to "genes" and saying increased unlawful arrivals have led to there being "many bad genes in our country right now."
Speaking in an interview, Trump was criticizing his opponent in the upcoming elections, Vice President Kamala Harris, saying she wants to "go into a communist party system." He then pivoted and made reference to recent figures about immigrants with criminal records living in the country, which have been making the rounds lately.
"How about allowing people to come to an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers, many of them murdering far more than one person, and are now happily living in the United States. I believe this, it's in their genes, and we have a lot of bad genes in the country right now,"
JUST NOW: @realDonaldTrump leans heavily into race science by telling @hughhewitt that you can tell whether migrants are predisposed to committing murder by "their genes."
— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) October 7, 2024
"We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now," he adds. pic.twitter.com/t722iYq4Hm
Trump was making reference to figures shared in late September by Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Tex.). Back then, he published a letter on his X account from acting ICE Director P.J. Lechleitner with a caption from Gonzales that read: "As of July 21, 2024, there were 662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories on ICE's national docket—13,099 criminally convicted MURDERS!"
At rallies over the weekend, Trump echoed the report, blaming the Biden administration for the release of thousands of immigrants with criminal records who are now "free to roam and kill in our country." Moreover, Iowa Republican Sens. Charles E. Grassley and Joni Ernst proposed legislation that would deport undocumented immigrants convicted of sex crimes.
The Better Enforcement of Grievous Offenses by Unnaturalized Emigrants (BE GONE) Act would classify sexual assault and aggravated sexual violence as "aggravated felonies" under the Immigration and Nationality Act. Migrants convicted of "aggravated felonies" would be subjected to immediate deportation and barred from reentering the U.S., as The Washington Times reports.
However, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a statement claiming that Republicans are "misinterpreting" the ICE data. The figures, the person said, actually go back decades and "includes people who entered the country over the past 40 year or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this administration."
In fact, DHS explains that the 13,099 immigrants with murder convictions cited by Trump and his allies are part of ICE's "non-detained" docket, a list of nearly 7 million people who have pending immigration cases before the agency but who are not jailed by ICE for various reasons — such as because they are currently incarcerated by federal, state or local authorities or because they have already served their criminal sentences but have not been deported.
Trump, however, has not relied solely on the figures to advance his rhetoric, recently saying in Wisconsin that "If Kamala is reelected, your town, and every town just like it, all across Wisconsin and all across our country — the heartland, the coast, it doesn't matter — will be transformed into a third-world hellhole"
Trump also went on to describe Harris as "mentally disabled" and claimed that the Biden administration's policies represented a betrayal of the nation. He warned that the U.S. would be overrun by violent criminals and "terrorists" if current border policies continued, emphasizing that the country was at risk of losing its identity, and suggesting mass deportations are the solution.
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