An hour later, Trump took to the stage to slam what he called an “invasion” at the southern border, declaring that illegal immigrants were “changing the fabric of our country,” turning it into a “garbage dump” and “at war with our families.”
“We’re not going to let them destroy our country,” Trump said.
Trump often uses dehumanizing language and hyperbolic claims to denounce illegal immigration. He claims without evidence that countries around the world are emptying their prisons and psychiatric hospitals to purposely funnel people into the United States. He has detailed brutal crimes committed by police in arresting suspected illegal immigrants, and has said some immigrants are “animals” and “not human” when discussing accusations of violence. Despite an increase in illegal border crossings during President Joe Biden’s term, Trump says immigrants are fueling a crime wave and literally come from “Third World dungeons.” This coincides with a decline in violent crime.
At the same time, Trump is also winning over Latinos, who are less likely than the electorate as a whole to back his calls for border enforcement. Recent polls show that his strategy is It might work.
Immigration, arguably the issue on which Trump was most effective in 2016, remains a central part of his campaign as it has been in the past, drawing condemnation from many Democrats but few Republicans. Voters say they trust Trump more than Biden on immigration in polls, and Trump has been gaining ground among Hispanic voters in polls, especially in Nevada.
Democrats hope that Trump’s rhetoric and promises of mass deportations will help rally key voters to the anti-Trump camp, but nearly a decade after bursting onto the political scene promising to “build a wall” on the U.S.-Mexico border, Trump is betting that his hardline anti-immigrant rhetoric will help him retake the White House.
Maca Casado, the Biden campaign’s Hispanic media director, mocked Trump’s “Latinos Support Trump” campaign launch on Sunday, saying in a statement that “all we saw today was a wannabe dictator spewing his trademark hatred against our community.”
In 2016, President Trump campaigned on a promise to implement mass deportations of illegal immigrants, but he never fully implemented the idea due to the enormous cost and complexity of the plan.
The idea remains popular: 62 percent of registered voters nationwide support a plan to “deport all illegal immigrants,” according to a CBS News poll released Sunday. But his bold promise to deport millions of immigrants already in the country remains deeply controversial and would be difficult to implement.
What has changed, critics say, is the level of backlash Trump faces.
“It’s becoming acceptable to routinely dehumanize immigrants,” said Vanessa Cardenas, executive director of the immigrant rights group America’s Voice. “There’s no real backlash.”
Biden blamed Trump for steering Republicans toward bipartisan border legislation that some in the GOP feared would hand Democrats an election-year victory. Last week, Biden signed an executive order aimed at limiting the number of migrants seeking asylum at the southern border, a measure that more than 70% of registered voters supported, according to a CBS News poll.
Trump blasted the order on Sunday. “It’s weak. It’s ineffective. It’s bullshit,” he said, as the crowd joined in, chanting expletives along the way.
Trump and other Republicans have a powerful bipartisan theme for the White House, as Americans have widely criticized Biden’s handling of the southern border and are more likely to trust Trump on the issue. Officials across the political spectrum have expressed concern about their own communities’ ability to absorb undocumented immigrants, in part because border states have bused migrants to liberal cities.
At rallies and on social media, Trump frequently makes claims about immigration that are unsubstantiated, misleading or difficult to fact-check. He has said that illegal immigrants are “destroying” the Social Security system, when in reality they are paying taxes into a program they cannot use. (Trump’s campaign says that could change if illegal immigrants were given a path to citizenship, as Biden has proposed.)
He said “Biden’s border invasion” amounts to “economic warfare against African-American and Hispanic-American families.” While analysts say undocumented immigrants can lower wages in some sectors, they often compete for different jobs than U.S. citizens and play important roles in the economy.
Trump has also said that immigration is part of a plan to import voters to help his opponents, but voting by foreigners is almost always illegal and extremely rare. Trump has accused immigrants of “replacing American children” in schools and “staining our country’s blood,” a statement that recent polls show half of Americans agree with.
“They’re trying to change our laws,” Las Vegas voter Linda Morton said of Democrats at a rally Sunday. “They’re trying to change our demographics… They’re trying to turn this country into a country we don’t know anymore.”
Morton, who is in his 70s, acknowledged that some of the immigrants who cross the border are probably good people, but he believes most “don’t love our country” and “don’t want to assimilate.”
Trump’s critics say they will work hard to remind voters of his record on immigration, including his administration’s separation of illegal immigrant children from their parents, and to raise awareness, including among Hispanic voters, of the scope of his plans for a second term.
“People have become desensitized to the extremism he’s spewing,” said Maria Teresa Kumar, president of the voter participation nonprofit Voter Latino.
Voters at Sunday’s rally, many of whom made immigration a top priority, lined up under umbrellas in temperatures exceeding 100 degrees. The county fire department told local news outlets that they received numerous calls about heatstroke and six people were taken to hospital.
“Build a wall!” a man waiting to get in suddenly shouted. A few steps away, another man held a sign under his arm that read, “Build a wall, kick them all out.”
Campaign spokeswoman Caroline Leavitt said Trump was “telling the unvarnished truth about the evil and cruelty of Biden’s open borders — the lives he’s ruined and destroyed, the cities he’s destroyed” and that he believes “one American life lost at the hands of an illegal immigrant is one too many.”
Trump embraced longtime ally Joe Arpaio in Phoenix last week, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, who was accused of racial profiling and found in contempt of court in 2017 for ignoring a federal judge’s orders to stop detaining people solely on suspicion of being in the country illegally. President Trump pardoned Arpaio that same year.
The Biden campaign on Saturday released a new digital ad depicting Mr. Trump and Mr. Arpaio embracing, noting that some mainstream Republicans, including former House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, had previously criticized Mr. Trump’s decision to pardon the sheriff.
“The people you hang out with define who you are,” Biden’s Casado said in a statement.
Democrats have long held an advantage among voters of color, but polls have shown Trump making gains this election, especially among Hispanics. Republicans point out that many Hispanic voters support border restrictions and trust Trump on the economy, which Trump has also linked to immigration issues.
Trump’s rise among Hispanic voters has been one of the most notable in Nevada, where a recent New York Times/Siena College poll found that in a head-to-head race between Biden and Trump, 50% of Hispanic voters said they would support Trump, while 41% said they would support Biden.
Some of Trump’s supporters wish he would tone it down a bit. “If he would just shut up 10 percent of the time, his favorability would increase dramatically,” said Tom Trahan, 73, of the battleground state of Michigan. “Shut up! Stop telling me immigrants are trash and poisoning the country…Just say you don’t like them.”
But the remarks aren’t a critical sticking point for Trahan and many other Trump supporters who admire the former president’s willingness to break the normal boundaries of political debate.
“He’s an outsider. He’s a businessman. And that’s what we need,” Mr. Trahan said. Like many of the people who gathered at a diner in Birch Run, Michigan, last month to hear local Republican candidates speak, Mr. Trahan said he plans to vote for Mr. Trump.
Maeve Reston contributed to this report.
