close
close

topicnews · August 27, 2024

Trump likes to talk about a wave of migrant crime that only he can stop. Lies.

Trump likes to talk about a wave of migrant crime that only he can stop. Lies.

Doesn’t it seem like scaremongering is all the former president has to offer?

play

Donald Trump began his political career in June 2015 with a bold and false appeal to Americans’ fears, based on the distorted narrative that immigrants bring only crime and chaos to this country.

Now, more than nine years later — after winning and losing the presidency — Trump is still spouting the same old lies about why people come to this country while asking Americans to put him back in the White House. After all this time, he’s still spouting the same old crap.

Trump mixes misinformation about the country’s crime rate with anecdotal details about individual crimes committed by immigrants who have entered the country illegally, creating the twisted fiction that we are all constantly under siege by invaders. In this false narrative, Trump presents himself as the only person who can save us.

This disgusting mix of narcissism and nativism has appealed to some people over the past nine years, but there are numerous studies that refute the idea that migrants increase our crime rates.

Trump would never let the truth get in the way of a horror story.

Remember when Republicans listened to Trump and scrapped the border security agreement?

Here’s a bit of news that directly contradicts Trump’s claims on immigration: After a series of spikes in illegal border crossings at the U.S. southern border, migrant apprehensions there fell in July to their lowest level during the Biden administration.

But good news does nothing to quell Trump’s fearmongering, so he traveled to Arizona on Thursday and stood near the border, claiming that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris had “unleashed a deadly plague of migrant crime upon our country.”

How would Trump tackle the problem at the border? He has already shown us his plan: do nothing. That was his order earlier this year, when one of the most conservative Republicans in Congress drafted a bipartisan border security bill in the U.S. Senate.

Trump’s rampant lies about crime: Crime has gone down since he became president. He insists on lying about it.

Trump knew that such a success would not help him in the presidential election as long as the Democrats held the White House. So he called on his party to overturn its own deal. And the Republicans did it. Just like that.

Trump tried to claim at the border Thursday that the legislation he opposed was not bipartisan. Like so much of what Trump says, it’s a lie that forces his supporters to simply ignore what we all see, hear and know.

When Harris accepted her party’s nomination as presidential candidate at the Democratic convention in Chicago a few hours later, she accused Trump of bringing down the law but vowed to revive it if she won the election in November.

“I refuse to play politics with our security,” Harris said, citing her experience as a prosecutor at the local and federal levels.

You guessed it. Trump continues to lie about immigration.

Brianna Seid, a staff attorney at the Brennan Center For Justice, told me that the individual stories Trump has told about crimes against America “should absolutely be taken seriously.” But his larger story that immigrants are driving up crime is not supported by decades of criminal justice research, she said.

A more recent example: Seid and her colleagues studied undocumented immigrants who were bused to New York in recent years by conservative southern governors as part of political stunts. The researchers found no increase in crime after these immigrants arrived.

And portraying all migrants as criminals can influence whether they seek help from law enforcement when they become victims of crime.

“Perpetuating harmful stereotypes that there is this ‘migrant crime wave’ could have the effect of fostering hostility towards their communities, which in turn impacts their reluctance to go to the police,” Seid told me.

Trump bases his flawed link between immigration and crime on his fact-free claim that countries in South America are emptying their prisons and sending prisoners to America. Seid noted that the total prison population in South America has increased by 224% since 2000.

How can prisons be emptied when their population has tripled? This only works if facts don’t matter.

The Trump campaign team is desperately trying to convince voters of a lie

Trump is playing into the hands of his Republican base by portraying immigrants as predators, but he hopes that message will also resonate with independent and Democratic voters.

The Pew Research Center reported that a majority (57 percent) of American adults in a January poll said “the large number of immigrants seeking entry into the country is leading to more crime.”

Broken down by party and ideology, 85 percent of Republicans and 90 percent of self-described conservatives shared this opinion, while only 31 percent of Democrats and 21 percent of self-described liberals shared this opinion.

“While this is a huge partisan divide, it’s notable that a majority of Americans actually believe there is a link between more immigrants and more crime, even though the data may not support it,” John Gramlich, deputy director of the Pew Research Center, told me.

Trump’s lead in Pennsylvania is gone. Vance’s solution: Just don’t believe it. No, really.

Apart from crime, a clear majority of respondents (78 percent) considered the large influx of migrants to be a serious problem: 45 percent called it a crisis and 32 percent a major problem.

That’s what Trump is trying to exploit – a perception among voters that collapses when compared to the available empirical evidence. He continues to spread the lie while lying about the evidence.

Is scaremongering the only tactic Trump is pursuing in this election campaign?

I wrote last week about how Trump spreads misinformation about America’s crime rate, which has dropped since he left office, to portray Democrats as unwilling to do what’s necessary to keep the country safe. He attacks federal agencies and their data when the numbers contradict his claims.

He has linked these issues – crime and immigration – because he can only scare the American electorate. He has already shown us that he thinks solutions are worthless unless they directly and immediately benefit him.

The Democratic presidential candidate said in her speech on Thursday that Trump would use his second term and “the immense powers of the President of the United States not to improve your life, not to strengthen our national security, but to serve the only client he has ever had: himself.”

On crime and immigration, Trump is unintentionally doing all the work to prove Harris is right on those issues.

Follow USA TODAY election columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan

You may also like...