Editorial: Mexican 'rapists' seems so mild compared to what Trump says about immigrants today

In 2015, Donald Trump shocked the political establishment and many Americans when he came down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his first presidential candidacy and attacked Mexican migrants:

“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” Trump said at the time.

Grouping migrants seeking a better life with dangerous criminals was certainly appalling. But, today, the immigration rhetoric of Trump and his allies has evolved to such new extremes that his infamous words from nine years ago seem mild in comparison.

The latest example: Trump’s unfounded and debunked accusations during the recent presidential debate that Haitian Americans are stealing and eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. Officials and police in the city, and Ohio’s Republican governor, have said there are no credible reports of that happening.

Trump’s immigration fear-mongering exploits reasonable concerns people have about the U.S. southern border with the use of lies and misinformation whose truthfulness his campaign doesn’t even try to defend anymore. The probability that at least some voters will believe them makes the gamble worth it.

In a CNN interview over the weekend, Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, a U.S. senator from Ohio, defended the unverified rumors about Haitians.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Vance told CNN’s Dana Bash. “You guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.”

When Bash responded, “You just said you are creating this story,” Vance backtracked and said he meant he created the media focus on the issues small towns face because of immigration.

Vance’s shameful rationalization aside, Trump isn’t trying to spark a reasonable debate or come up with solutions to the nation’s immigration policies. Were he interested in doing so, he wouldn’t have pushed congressional Republicans to block a bipartisan border security bill.

Dehumanizing immigrants — especially Black ones from poor countries like Haiti — is a vicious but effective political tool. With the current state of distrust in the media and institutions, the sky’s the limit when it comes to perpetuating pernicious myths about migrants.

The former president has accused migrants of invading the U.S., borrowed Nazi language when he accused them of “poisoning the blood of our country.” He’s the estimated number of undocumented migrants to 21 million — most studies estimate there are 11 million of them — and evoked the neo-Nazi Great Replacement Theory on the debate stage last week.

Trump said that “a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote.” There is no evidence of a mass effort to get undocumented immigrants to register to vote. Trump’s claim echoes the racist theory that non-white immigrants are replacing white voters.

His allies have followed suit. A sheriff in Ohio wrote on social media this week that he wants people to write down the addresses of homes with Harris signs. He then referred to migrants as insects.

“Sooo…when the Illegal human ‘Locust’ (which she supports!) Need places to live…We’ll already have the addresses of the their New families…who supported their arrival!” Portage County Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski wrote.

This is not just rhetoric. The Great Replacement Theory has been linked to mass shootings, such as the killing of 10 people, most of them Black, in Buffalo, New York, in 2022 and the massacre of 22 people at a Walmart in a heavily Hispanic part of El Paso, Texas.

Political violence, or the threat of it, has put the nation on alert this election cycle after law enforcement arrested a man suspected of attempting to ambush Trump at his West Palm Beach golf course. Two months ago, a different suspect tried to kill him at a Pennsylvania rally. In Springfield, officials have reported several bomb threats after Trump and Vance spread rumors about its Haitian-American population.

And yet there is no sign that Trump will tamp down what he says about immigrants. The consequences can be serious.

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