Former President Donald Trump.
(AP Photo/Morry Gash, file)
Trump said undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” The Biden campaign said his words were “parroting Adolf Hitler.”Trump’s comments in New Hampshire, come as Senate Republicans try to force Biden to bolster border security.
Former President Donald Trump said undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” in an inflammatory campaign speech in New Hampshire on Saturday.
The speech has drawn criticism from those who say his language echoes Nazi rhetoric.
“They’ve poisoned mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just the three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world they’re coming into our country, from Africa from Asia, all over the world they’re pouring into our country,” Trump said.
Trump has previously claimed, without evidence, that South American countries send patients from “mental institutions” to the United States as migrants.
He went on to suggest the migrants would bring in “terrorism” and said, “the crime is going to be tremendous.”
A spokesperson for the Biden campaign, Ammar Moussa, said that Trump’s comments “parroted Adolf Hitler,” per Politico.
Trump previously used language about immigrants “poisoning the blood” in an interview earlier this year. In response, the Anti-Defamation League’s leader, Jonathan Greenblatt, called his language “racist, xenophobic and despicable,” per Reuters.
The “poisoning the blood of our country” language was not included in prepared remarks distributed to media before the event on Saturday, and it is not clear whether it was pre-written or improvised by the former president, Reuters reported.
Trump has long presented himself as tough on immigration, making building “The Wall” on the US-Mexico border a cornerstone policy of his first presidential campaign and implementing a strict “zero tolerance” policy in office which saw thousands of migrant children being separated from their parents.
Trump has promised to finish the wall he never completed, bring back travel bans, and launch the largest deportation efforts in history if re-elected in 2024.
His latest comments come at a time of record numbers of immigrants reaching the border and Senate Republicans asking for increased border security spending in exchange for approving more aid to Ukraine.
Authorities recorded 2.4 million migrant encounters at the southern border in the last fiscal year, an increase from 1.7 million in 2021.