As midterm vote nears, Trump resumes stoking fears about immigrants

President Trump’s closing argument is now clear: Build tent cities for migrants. End birthright citizenship. Fear the caravan. Send active-duty troops to the border. Refuse asylum.

Immigration has been the animating issue of the Trump presidency, and now — with the possibility that Republicans could face significant losses in the midterm elections on Tuesday — the president has fully embraced a dark, anti-immigrant message in the hope that stoking fear will motivate voters to reject Democrats.

In a rambling speech on Thursday afternoon that was riddled with falsehoods and vague promises to confront a “crisis” at the border, Trump used the official backdrop of the White House to step up his efforts to demonize a caravan of Central Americans that has been making its way through Mexico, assail Democrats, and promote a vision of a United States that would be better off with fewer immigrants.

The president said he had ordered troops to respond to any migrants in the caravan who throw rocks as if they were brandishing firearms, saying, “I told them: Consider it a rifle.” He said his government had already begun to construct “massive cities of tents” to imprison legal and illegal immigrants who try to enter the United States.

“This is a defense of our country,” Trump declared from a lectern in the Roosevelt Room before leaving the White House to attend a campaign rally in Missouri. “We have no choice. We will defend our borders. We will defend our country.”

The president also played fast and loose with the truth. At one point, he said that 97 percent of immigrants apprehended at the border and released into the United States do not show up for their trials; the number is closer to 28 percent. He also said the government is no longer releasing immigrants while they await trial. Meanwhile, migrants are being caught and released at the border regularly, as has happened for decades.

He repeated his oft-stated, misleading description of the situation south of the border, saying that “large, organized caravans” are heading toward the United States, filled with “tough people, in many cases.”

“A lot of young men, strong men,” he continued, “and a lot of men we maybe don’t want in our country.”

“They have injured; they have attacked,” he added.

In recent weeks, Trump has promised a number of actions to demonstrate a renewed crackdown on immigrants. While he has followed through on one of them — ordering an increase in military units on the border — there was no mention in the speech of the presidential proclamation on asylum and the new policy on family separation that he has promised.

Mostly what the president offered was a repeat of the angry rhetoric that has been a central theme of his campaign rallies and in Fox News interviews for the past two weeks.

A new proposal to give migrant families the choice to willingly separate from their children? “We are working” on it, Trump said. The presidential proclamation and regulation aides had promised to bring an end to asylum for illegal immigrants? They are “finalising” them, he added. He promised an executive order next week, providing no details but saying it would be “quite comprehensive.”

Raising fears about immigrants has been a central theme for Trump since he first announced he was running for president. On Thursday night, in a chilly airplane hangar in Columbia, Mo., with Air Force One as his backdrop, Trump whipped thousands of supporters into a chorus of boos over the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship, dismissing a core tenet of the 14th Amendment as a “crazy, lunatic policy that we can end.”

He warned that the Constitution’s grant of citizenship to any person born on United States soil could benefit the offspring of “an enemy of our country” or “a dictator with war on your mind.”
© 2018 The New York Times News Service