Politicians

Donald Trump made his way to the White House in 2016 on the back of a xenophobic and racist speech and believes that this is the best way to regain the presidency eight years later. The Republican candidate has redoubled his bet with allusions to the “bad genes” that criminal immigrants are bringing to the country, two words that he continually associates. Trump has made irregular immigration the scapegoat for all the problems that afflict the United States, without caring about resorting to hoaxes. It is not a new strategy, not even in this campaign, but the former president has made it the axis around which all his messages revolve, whether to talk about crime, economic problems or even help for hurricane victims. Helene.

Trump dedicated himself to spewing lies about the response to the devastating storm, including that President Joe Biden ignored the response and was “sleeping” without picking up the phone to the governor of Georgia, Republican Brian Kemp, something that he himself denied it. He also floated the baseless idea that the government was leaving Republican-majority areas without help. But the message he has insisted on most is the falsehood that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had run out of money because funds had been diverted to undocumented immigrants.

“It is categorically false. It’s not true. “It is a false statement,” White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre responded at a press conference. His denial was of no use, nor that of the Agency itself, nor that of the Department of Homeland Security, nor even that of the “Republican” president of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson. Trump continued to spout that lie and take out of context the fact that the first initial emergency aid to those affected is $750 per person to maintain that that is all they were going to receive.

The former president already demonstrated in the debate with the Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris, that he did not care whether an accusation was true or not as long as it fit into his political narrative that immigrants are invading the United States because of Joe Biden’s Government. and his vice president and are the cause of almost all the evils. That’s when he blurted out: “In Springfield [Ohio]those who have entered are eating the dogs, they are eating the cats. They are eating the pets that live there. “This is what is happening in our country, and it is a shame,” he said.

Next to Springfield, another town lends itself particularly well to the former president’s objectives and was also referred to in the debate. This is Aurora, a city of 400,000 inhabitants in Colorado. A large number of immigrants have arrived in the area and there are real problems of insecurity and unhealthiness in degraded areas, which in reality already existed before the last wave of migration. But the Republicans, with Trump at the helm, have ridden on the back of a hoax that fit their purposes like a glove, despite the damage it caused to the city.

A video showing armed men on the landing of a staircase in a building in Aurora helped the Republicans maintain that gangs of Venezuelans, particularly the so-called Aragua Train, were violently taking over entire areas of the city. city. After the flight that occurred, there were interests of the company that owns the three-building complex where the video was recorded and its resistance to rehabilitating it. He found the perfect excuse in the Venezuelan gangs and the images of the landing were broadcast in a loop incessantly on conservative channels, especially Fox News.

How much Aurora

It is also true, however, that authorities are concerned about the activity of the Aragua Train, not only in Aurora, but also other parts of the country, including New York. That provides a perfect breeding ground for Trump’s message. The former president has said that the mass deportation of immigrants that he plans to launch if he returns to the White House will begin in Springfield and Aurora.

The Trump campaign has announced in an apocalyptic tone a rally for its candidate in the city of Colorado for this Friday. “Aurora, Colorado, has become a ‘war zone’ due to the influx of violent Venezuelan gang members imprisoned by the Aragua Train. With approximately 43,000 migrants flooding into the neighboring city of Denver since December 2022, many of these migrants have arrived in Aurora, bringing chaos and fear. “Local families have been forced to flee their homes as members of the Tren de Aragua terrorize apartment complexes with guns, robberies, and rampant drug activity,” their call reads. “Kamala’s border bloodbath has turned all states into border states, leaving Colorado families at the mercy of crime,” he adds.

In a radio interview broadcast on Monday, Trump insisted on his xenophobic messages, linking immigration and crime and stating that the arrival of immigrants had brought “bad genes” to the United States. His campaign later said he was referring to criminals, not immigrants in general. “What about allowing people to come in across an open border, 13,000 of whom were murderers? Many of them murdered many more than one person,” Trump said. “And now they live happily in the United States. You know, now a murderer… I believe this: it’s in his genes. And we have a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” The statistics cited by Trump are for immigrants who have entered the country for decades, including his tenure.

On Sunday, at the rally he gave with Elon Musk in Butler (Pennsylvania), where he had suffered an attack in July, he maintained that all over the world they are emptying prisons to send their “murderers, drug traffickers, human traffickers and gang members” to the United States as immigrants. “They are releasing everyone in our country, and they are emptying their prisons,” he said.

The White House spokeswoman criticized Trump on Monday for his statement: “That type of language is hateful, disgusting, inappropriate and has no place in our country,” she said at a press conference. The former president has spoken in the past that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the United States, paraphrasing none other than Adolf Hitler.

Harris recalled Monday in an interview on the show 60 Minutes, of the CBS network, that his rival torpedoed a bipartisan agreement in the Senate to pass a border security law. “Donald Trump found out that this bill was in the works and could be passed, and he wants to ride on a problem instead of fixing a problem,” he said. “I think the American people want a leader who will not try to divide us and demean us,” he added.