Trump’s warnings about words add to a pattern of stoking fear around migrants coming into the U.S.
Warning about the dangers of illegal immigration at the southern border has long been one of Donald Trump’s campaign mainstays, going back to the day he launched his first presidential bid. At the time, he said Mexico was sending “rapists” and people who were bringing “drugs” and “crime.”
But lately, the former president has seized on a new thing he says migrants are bringing: languages.
“We have languages coming into our country. We don’t have one instructor in our entire nation that can speak that language,” Trump said before a crowd of thousands of supporters at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, D.C., last month.
“These are languages — it’s the craziest thing — they have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a very horrible thing,” he added.
Trump repeated the comment the following week during an appearance at the southern border alongside Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, saying that migrants are entering the country speaking “truly foreign languages.”
“Nobody speaks them,” he said after a tour of the border in Eagle Pass.
And addressing a rally in Virginia Saturday night, Trump described New York classrooms as overwhelmed with “pupils from foreign countries, from countries where they don’t even know what the language is.”
“We have nobody that even teaches it. These are languages that nobody ever heard of,” he claimed.
It’s not entirely clear what languages Trump is referencing.
When asked to clarify Trump’s remarks, campaign spokesman Steven Cheung responded, “There are migrants invading from countries that we know nothing about, which is the point.” He did not respond to a follow-up question about what those countries are.
At campaign rallies, Trump routinely says he would carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in history if re-elected. Trump also vows to reinstate his infamous Muslim travel ban, expand it to include Gazan refugees, and incorporate “ideological screenings” for all immigrants. Trump has also claimed multiple times that immigrants are poisoning the blood of America, a comment President Joe Biden’s campaign likened to the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler.
