Former President Donald Trump ratcheted up his hardline rhetoric on immigration on Saturday, accusing Vice President Kamala Harris and the Biden administration of welcoming criminals into the country and warning that without mass deportations, the U.S. will lose its “culture.”
Speaking to a crowd in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, Trump bashed Harris’ visit to the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona on Friday, during which she vowed to go even further than President Joe Biden has in cracking down on illegal immigration. Flanked by posterboards featuring images of migrants convicted of crimes, Trump spun a grim vision of a U.S. overrun by violent “terrorists,” calling Harris “mentally disabled” and contending that the Biden administration’s border policies are “a betrayal of the American nation.”
“You gotta get these people back where they came from. You have no choice. You’re going to lose your culture, you’re going to lose your country, you’re going to have crime the likes of which nobody has ever seen before,” Trump said, acknowledging that the speech was particularly “dark,” even by his standards.
The speech served as a direct response to Harris’ more aggressive posture on the border — and an amplification of an issue that has long animated Trump’s base. In a close election with Harris, polls suggest immigration is a strong point for him.
On Saturday, Trump depicted Whitewater, Wisconsin, as a “small, very beautiful town” being “flooded” by an influx of migrants echoing the rhetoric he’s used to describe Springfield, Ohio, and Aurora, Colorado, as victims of a migrant “invasion.”
“If Kamala is reelected, your town, and every town just like it, all across Wisconsin and all across our country — the heartland, the coast, it doesn’t matter — will be transformed into a third-world hellhole,” he said.
In a statement to POLITICO, Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said Trump has “nothing ‘inspiring’ to offer the American people, just darkness.”
Trump and his allies have seized on new data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement in recent days, attacking Harris over the 425,000 undocumented migrants with criminal convictions who are not in ICE custody (they could still be serving a sentence in local, state or federal detention). The former president has said that these migrants were let into the country under the Biden administration, but DHS data from past years shows that Trump’s statement is misleading.
The majority of these individuals with criminal convictions were already on the non-detained docket and living in the United States before Biden took office. There were 405,786 convicted criminals on the non-detained docket in June 2021, meaning this number has increased by less than 5 percent since Biden became president. Before Trump won the White House in 2016, this number was 368,000 as of April that year — a figure that would increase by more than 37,000 by June 2021.
Of the roughly 647,000 total non-detained, undocumented migrants on ICE’s docket — categorized as convicted criminals or awaiting pending criminal charges — approximately 152,000 of them are for violent crimes, including murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assaults. The numbers also include nonviolent and petty crime — 126,000 are for traffic violations, while 92,000 are for immigration-related crimes (like crossing the border illegally).
And while migrant crime has been a focal point of the 2024 race — an issue heightened by cases of U.S. women and girls allegedly murdered by immigrants in the country illegally — studies have shown that migrants are not more likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born Americans. Still, Trump has promoted falsehoods about immigrant communities, including the conspiracy theory that Haitian migrants were eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio.
“Kamala has allowed more than 20 million criminals into the country because everyone who illegally crosses the border and breaks our nation’s laws is, by definition, a criminal,” Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to POLITICO. “Kamala wants to give mass amnesty to rapists, murderers, and other violent illegal monsters. President Trump will begin the largest mass deportation in history on day one.”
Trump himself is a convicted felon, found guilty earlier this year of 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to a porn star. He was also found liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll and is barred from operating businesses in New York state after being found liable for massive business fraud. And Trump has been indicted in three other cases in which he is accused of sprawling criminal conduct before, during and after his presidency.
