An hour later, Trump took the stage and railed against what he called an “invasion” at the southern border, declaring that undocumented immigrants are “changing the fabric of our country,” turning it into a “dumping ground” and “fighting our families.”
“We’re not going to let them destroy our country,” Trump said.
Trump often uses dehumanizing language and hyperbolic claims to bash undocumented immigrants. He claims, without evidence, that foreign countries all over the world are emptying their prisons and mental institutions in a deliberate effort to offload people into the United States. He details gruesome crimes for which police have arrested undocumented suspects and, while discussing accusations of violence, has said some migrants are “animals” and “not people.” He says migrants are fueling a crime wave and literally hail from “the dungeons of the Third World,” even though the rise in illegal border crossing during Joe Biden’s presidency has coincided with a decrease in violent crime.
At the same time, Trump is courting Latinos, who are less likely than voters as whole to support his calls for a border crackdown. Recent polling suggests that his strategy might work.
Immigration was arguably Trump’s most effective argument in 2016 and remains central as ever to his campaign, drawing rebukes from many Democrats but few Republicans. Voters tell pollsters they trust Trump more than Biden on immigration, and Trump has gained with Hispanic voters in polling — especially in Nevada.
Democrats hope that Trump’s rhetoric and promises of mass deportations will help mobilize key voting groups against him. But almost a decade after he burst onto the political scene with promises to “build the wall” at the U.S.-Mexico border, Trump is betting that hard line anti-immigration rhetoric will help him reclaim the White House.
The Biden campaign’s Hispanic media director, Maca Casado, ridiculed Trump’s Sunday launch of “Latino Americans for Trump” and said in a statement, “All we saw today was a wannabe dictator spouting his trademark hatred for our community.”
In 2016, Trump campaigned on a promise to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, but never fully executed those ideas in part because of the immense cost and complexity of the plan.
The idea remains popular: 62 percent of registered voters nationwide support a program to “deport all undocumented immigrants,” according to a CBS News poll released Sunday. But his sweeping promises to deport millions of immigrants already in the country would still be massively disruptive and difficult to carry out.
Critics say that what has changed is the level of blowback Trump receives.
“It is becoming acceptable to dehumanize immigrants on a regular basis,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, the executive director of America’s Voice, an immigrant rights group. “There’s no real pushback.”
Biden has attacked Trump for turning the GOP against a bipartisan border bill that some Republicans feared would hand Democrats an election-year victory. Last week, he signed an executive order aimed at limiting the number of migrants who can seek asylum at the southern border, a move that more than 70 percent of registered voters approved of, according to the CBS News poll.
Trump assailed the executive order on Sunday. “It’s weak. It’s ineffective. It’s bull—t,” he said. The crowd echoed his remarks by chanting the expletive.
Americans have been broadly critical of Biden’s handling of the southern border and more likely to trust Trump on the issue, lending him and other Republicans a potent theme with cross-party appeal. Officials across the political spectrum have raised concerns about their communities’ ability to absorb undocumented immigrants, particularly as 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 says undocumented migrants are “killing” the Social Security system, when they actually pay into a program they cannot use. (His campaign says this could change if undocumented immigrants were given a pathway to citizenship, as Biden has proposed.)
He says that “Biden’s border invasion” amounts to “economic warfare on African American and Hispanic American families.” Analysts say that undocumented immigrants can decrease wages in some sectors, but also note that they often compete for different jobs than American citizens and play an important role in the economy.
Trump has also said migrants are let in as part of a plot to import voters who will help his opponent, though noncitizen voting is illegal in almost all cases and extremely rare. He accuses them of “taking the place” of American kids in schools and even “poisoning the blood of our country” — a statement that half of Americans agreed with in recent polling.
“They’re trying to change our laws,” Las Vegas voter Linda Morton said of Democrats at Sunday’s rally. “They’re trying to change our demographics. … They’re going to make it a country that we don’t even know anymore.”
Morton, who is in her 70s, allowed that some migrants crossing the border are probably good people but thinks most of them “don’t have a love for our country” and “don’t want to assimilate.”
Trump’s critics say they will be working hard to remind voters of Trump’s record on immigration — for instance, his administration’s separation of undocumented immigrant children from their parents — and raise awareness about the extent of his plans for a second term, including among Latino voters.
“People become desensitized to the extremism that he is spouting,” said María Teresa Kumar, the president of voter engagement nonprofit Voto Latino.
Immigration was top-of-mind for many voters who showed up to the rally Sunday, lining up in temperatures that climbed above 100 degrees and shading themselves with umbrellas. The county fire department told local news outlets that it responded to many heat-related calls and that six people were taken to the hospital.
“Build the wall!” a man yelled, unprompted, as he waited to get in. A few paces away, another man held a BUILD THE WALL DEPORT THEM ALL sign under his arm.
Campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Trump “speaks the unadulterated truth about the evil and cruelty of Biden’s open border — the lives he has wrecked and destroyed, the towns he has crushed,” and that he believes “one American life lost at the hands of an illegal immigrant is one too many.”
In Phoenix last week, Trump hugged his longtime ally Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County who was accused of racial profiling and convicted in 2017 of criminal contempt of court for ignoring a federal judge’s order to stop detaining people based only on suspicion they were undocumented. Trump pardoned Arpaio the same year.
Biden’s campaign on Saturday announced a new digital ad showcasing Trump and Arpaio’s embrace — and noting that some establishment Republicans such as former House speaker Paul D. Ryan once criticized Trump’s decision to pardon the sheriff.
“You are the company you keep,” the Biden campaign’s Casado said in a statement.
Though Democrats have long held advantages with voters of color, polling shows that Trump is making inroads with them this election cycle, particularly with Latinos. Republicans note that many Latino voters favor border restrictions and trust Trump on the economy — an issue that Trump also links to immigration.
Trump’s gains among Hispanic voters have been among the most notable in Nevada. In a head-to-head matchup between Biden and Trump in the recent New York Times/Siena College poll of the Silver State, 50 percent of Hispanic voters said they were backing Trump while 41 percent said they were supporting Biden.
Some of Trump’s supporters wish he would tone things down a bit. “If he just shut his mouth, just about 10 percent of the time, his favorability rating would go way up,” said Tom Trahan, 73, from the swing state of Michigan. “Just shut up! You don’t say that these immigrants are trash and they’re poisoning the country. … Just say you don’t like them.”
But the rhetoric is not a dealbreaker for Trahan, and many other Trump backers who admire the former president’s willingness to shatter the normal bounds of political discourse.
“He’s an outsider. He’s a businessman. … And that’s what we need,” Trahan said. Like many of the people who gathered last month at a diner in Birch Run, Mich., to hear from local GOP candidates, Trahan says he plans to vote for Trump.
Maeve Reston contributed to this report.