Donald Trump detoured from the battleground states Friday to visit a Colorado suburb that’s been in the news over illegal immigration as he drives a message, often using false or misleading claims and dehumanizing language, that migrants are causing chaos in smaller American cities and towns.
Aurora entered the spotlight in August when a video circulated showing armed men walking through an apartment building housing Venezuelan migrants. Trump has claimed extensively that Venezuelan gangs are taking over buildings, even though authorities say that was a single block of the suburb near Denver, and the area is again safe.
Ignoring those denials from local authorities, Trump painted a picture of apartment complexes overrun by barbaric thugs» and streets unsafe to travel, blaming President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s Democratic rival.
They’re ruining your state, Trump said of the Democrats in the White House.
No person who has inflicted the violence and terror that Kamala Harris has inflicted on this community can ever be allowed to become the president of the United States, Trump added.
Trump often used dehumanizing language, referring to his political rivals as scum and to migrants as animals » who have invaded and conquered Aurora. The town is infected by Venezuela, he said.
We have to clean out our country, Trump said. And he reprised the first controversy of his career in politics, when he launched his 2016 campaign by saying migrants are rapists and bring drugs and crime.
I took a lot of heat for saying it, but I was right», Trump said Friday, repeating the false claim that other countries are emptying their prisons and mental institutions and dumping their worst criminals in the United States.
To thunderous applause, he called for the death penalty «for any migrant that kills an American citizen or a law enforcement officer.
Later Friday in Reno, Nevada, Trump insisted the US is an occupied country, and added, I make this vow to you: Nov. 5, 2024, will be liberation day in America. Liberation day.
Trump announced in Colorado that as president he’d launch Operation Aurora to focus on deporting members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, or TDA. The violent gang traces its origins more than a decade to an infamously lawless prison with hardened criminals.
