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Donald Trump’s latest rant against immigrants and asylum-seekers labeled people who traveled hundreds if not thousands of miles to reach the US as lazy, while the former president spurred his crowd into chanting “bulls***!” in response to Joe Biden’s efforts to address border security.
The ex-president spoke in Las Vegas on Sunday afternoon and railed against an executive order Biden signed this past week to address illegal border crossings. The order, signed by the president on Tuesday, allows the president to freeze the US asylum application system if illegal border crossings are occurring at an average rate of more than 2,500 per day.
“Last week, crooked Joe signed an executive order that is pro invasion, pro child trafficking, pro woman trafficking, pro human trafficking and pro drug dealers. It’s a pro drug dealer bill,” Trump said about the order, which is not a bill.
“What he signed means nothing. In fact, it makes it easier, in my opinion, it opens the border still further,” the ex-president continued.
He went on to label immigrants criminal and mentally ill, with the remainder smeared as lazy and “not productive” — and explicitly not part of his vision to “Make America Great Again”.
The entire world is emptying their prisons and jails, insane asylums and mental institutions. They’re emptying them out into your state, but they’re emptying out into all 50 states,” argued Trump. “Countries are dumping all of their criminals into our country, right? And also some people that are not criminals, but are not productive.”
Trump has pushed his often dehumanising and insulting rhetoric aimed at immigrants to the extreme in 2024 as he campaigns for the White House a third time. The ex-president’s latest White House bid is underscored by four criminal trials, one already having reached a guilty verdict, which are costing Trump both time and money in legal fees as he mounts several legal defences.
In New York this month Trump was found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business documents to conceal a hush money scheme aimed at preventing porn star Stormy Daniels and other women from revealing alleged affairs with Trump during his presidential campaign. He has vowed to appeal, and is due for sentencing in July.
While Trump could not make his charges in either New York or Georgia, where he is on trial for attempting to change the results of the 2020 election, go away he could conceivably bring an end to the prosecutions mounted by the Department of Justice were he to be elected president and sworn in before the cases concluded; the agency does not prosecute sitting presidents.
Immigration has typically been seen as an area of weakness for the Biden campaign and Donald Trump’s remarks on Sunday could be seen as his attempt to counter an effort by the president to paint his opponent as the one unwilling to seek compromise and usher through actual changes to America’s immigration policy beyond the surge in enforcement under Trump’s first term.
Biden and his party have seen an opening on the issue after Trump urged Republicans to kill a bipartisan compromise hammered out in the Senate which was centered around the main provision in his executive order. But it remains to be seen whether Democrats can effectively drive home the message blaming Republicans for the inaction on Capitol Hill.
Polls of Nevada, which went for Biden in 2020, indicate that Trump holds a small lead in the state.
