Former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event in Tucson, Arizona on Thursday. Trump used a trip around the southwest to focus on economic issues, but despite touting his economic policies, the candidate continued to focus on immigration and repeated false and debunked conspiracy theories about immigrant communities.
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Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Former President Donald Trump is on a tour across the Southwest, with rallies in Tucson, Arizona, and Las Vegas, and a press conference this morning at his golf course in Los Angeles.
According to the campaign statement, he focused on the economy in Arizona and Nevada, where the cost of living — especially housing costs — is a top concern for voters in states where rents and mortgages have skyrocketed since the pandemic hit.
But in an area closely tied to the US-Mexico border, where the former president sees immigration as a strength, he also continues to spread misinformation about Immigrant community in Aurora, Colorado.and Springfield, Ohio.
After making false claims about immigrants during Tuesday’s presidential debate, Trump spent much of his campaign speech in Tucson repeating false claims that legal migrants from Haiti — whom he falsely accuses of being illegal — are kidnapping and eating family pets.
And despite protests from officials in Colorado, he continued to say that Venezuelan gangs were running rampant and unchecked in the Denver suburb of Aurora.
At a press conference in California, Trump reiterated his campaign promise of mass deportations, naming Ohio and Colorado.
“We’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country. And we’re going to start with Springfield and Aurora,” Trump said Friday morning.
Calls from officials in both cities to stop fomenting hatred in their communities have fallen on deaf ears from Trump and his campaign.
On Friday in California, Trump continued to try to fact-check his false claims about a rise in violent crime — again attributing the rise to immigration-related crime without evidence. He claimed that the FBI falsified its own reporting on violent crime without providing any reason for that claim. There is no evidence that the FBI reports crime statistics differently.
The former president’s rhetoric isn’t new, but the false reports he and other Republicans spread have played into his campaign message of fear of immigrants, as well as his criticism of Vice President Harris over the Biden administration’s border policies.
