On Friday, vice-president and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris stopped by Arizona and gave one of her toughest remarks on immigration yet, vowing to keep in place Biden's executive order limiting asylum and "keep the border closed". The speech continued a pattern for Harris, as she has been increasingly toughening her position on immigration, even shifting her stances on issues like the border wall.
The strategy is meant to put a dent on an issue which many believe to be Trump's path to a victory come November, an issue which recent studies have shown to be essential for voters.
On Saturday, however, Trump lashed back in a Wisconsin rally, intensifying his rhetoric on immigration once again by claiming that Harris' policies during the Biden administration are affecting the very core of the American values:
"You gotta get these people back where they came from. You have no choice. You're going to lose your culture, you're going to lose your country, you're going to have crime the likes of which nobody has ever seen before"
He then went on to use Whitewater, Wisconsin as a example of a "small, very beautiful town" that has been "flooded" by migrants, adding:
"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.
In a statement to Politico, Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt doubled down on the candidate's claims:
"Kamala has allowed more than 20 million criminals into the country because everyone who illegally crosses the border and breaks our nation's laws is, by definition, a criminal. Kamala wants to give mass amnesty to rapists, murderers, and other violent illegal monsters. President Trump will begin the largest mass deportation in history on day one."
Despite the former president's portrayal of migrant crime as a key issue in the 2024 election, which have been amplified by his vice-president, studies indicate that migrants are not more likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born citizens. A 2023 study by researchers at Stanford, Princeton, and other institutions found that, since 1880, immigrants have not been more likely to be imprisoned than U.S.-born citizens. Additionally, researches found that as immigration has increased, crime rates have decreased in recent years.
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