Donald Trump demonized immigrants during a campaign rally near Dayton, Ohio, on Saturday, telling supporters he thinks of some crossing the border as “animals” or not even “people.”
In a nearly 90-minute speech, the former president described an epidemic of immigrant-committed crimes and claimed, without evidence, that foreign leaders were offloading their prison populations at the southern U.S. border.
Trump baselessly suggested other countries were sending gang members and other undesirables to the United States before telling supporters, “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases. They’re not people, in my opinion.”
“But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say,” he defended, later referring to the hypothetical criminal migrants as “animals” and “bad people.”
Scott Olson via Getty Images
While Trump seemed confident that migrants contribute to crime, repeated studies, including a recent analysis published in the journal, Criminology, have found that increased populations of undocumented immigrants are generally associated with decreases in violent crime in any given area.
During a Sunday appearance on Fox News, the Republican doubled-down on his claims.
Returning to rhetoric he used last December, he told interviewer Howard Kurtz that the “country is being poisoned” by migrants.
“We can be nice about it, we can talk about, ‘Oh, I want to be politically correct,’” Trump said. “But we have people coming in from prisons and jails, long-term murderers, people with sentences that the rest of their lives they’re going to spend in some jail in some country that many people have never even heard of. They’re all being released into our country.”