On Monday, Republican contender for president Donald Trump implied that foreign nationals in the United States who had murdered someone done so because “it’s in their genes.” He continued by saying, “a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
It’s only the most recent instance of Trump making claims about how immigration is altering the genetic composition of the United States. Unauthorized immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” he said last year, citing Hitler’s rhetoric.
On Monday, during an interview with conservative radio presenter Hugh Hewitt, Trump made the remarks. He shifted gears to attack Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate for president in 2024, and brought up immigration data that the DHS claims contain cases from his administration.
What about letting 13,000 people, including killers, enter over an open border? Trump added that many of them killed multiple people. They made it to the United States, where they are currently thriving. Killers, as far as I’m concerned, have it written all over their bodies. And unfortunately, our nation is currently rife with negative genes. Then there were the 425,000 illegal immigrants that entered our nation.
The Trump team claimed that the president’s remarks concerning genes were a reference to serial killers.
Clearly, he was talking about killers, not immigrants. In a statement, Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt expressed her frustration with the media’s willingness to support criminals, whether they be murderers, rapists, or illegal immigrants, in exchange for negative headlines about the president.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement provided Republican Representative Tony Gonzales with data last month regarding individuals under its supervision, including those who are not in ICE custody. Of those, 4,25,431 are now doing time in prison for various crimes, and 13,099 have been found guilty of murder.
However, those figures cover a long period of time, even including Trump’s presidency. Additionally, according to the Department of Homeland Security, which governs ICE, individuals who are not already in the custody of ICE may be taken into custody by local or state law enforcement.
Officials from Harris’s campaign chose not to comment.
“That type of language, it’s hateful, it’s disgusting, it has no place in our country,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters during Monday’s briefing when asked about Trump’s “bad genes” comment.
Harris has attempted to portray a harder attitude on immigration in an effort to address a vulnerability while campaigning, while the Biden administration has tightened asylum limits for refugees.
The issue of illegal immigration has been front and center in the 2024 campaign of the former president and Republican nominee, who has promised to launch the biggest deportation operation in American history if elected. He has a history of derogatory remarks against immigrants, including calling them “animals” and “killers” and claiming that they bring diseases with them.
Falsely claiming that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were kidnapping and eating pets was Trump’s accusation last month during his debate with Harris.
During his presidency, he expressed his disapproval of the United States’ preference for Haitian and African immigrants over Norwegian ones and advised three American-born and two black congresswomen to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
