Trump stumps in Aurora, Colorado with immigration message

AURORA, Colo. (AP) — Donald Trump detoured from the battleground states Friday to visit a Colorado suburb that’s been in the news over illegal immigration as he drives a message, that migrants are causing chaos in smaller American cities and towns.

Trump’s rally in Aurora marked the first time ahead of the November election that either presidential campaign has visited Colorado, which reliably votes Democratic statewide.

The Republican nominee has long promised to stage the largest deportation operation in U.S. history and has made immigration core to his political persona since the day he launched his first campaign in 2015. Over the last few months, Trump has pinpointed specific smaller communities that have seen large arrivals of migrants, with tensions flaring locally over resources and some longtime residents expressing distrust about sudden demographic changes and economic challenges.

Aurora entered the spotlight in August when a video circulated showing armed men walking through an apartment building housing Venezuelan migrants. Trump sites the Venezuelan gangs taking over buildings.

Trump painted a picture of apartment complexes overrun by “barbaric thugs” and streets unsafe to travel, blaming President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s Democratic rival.

“They’re ruining your state,” Trump said of the Democrats in the White House.

“No person who has inflicted the violence and terror that Kamala Harris has inflicted on this community can ever be allowed to become the president of the United States,” Trump added.

Trump referred to his political rivals as “scum” who are destroying “the fabric of your culture” and to migrants as “ animals ” who have “invaded and conquered” Aurora. The town is “infected by Venezuela,” he said.

“We have to clean out our country,” Trump said. And he reprised the first controversy of his career in politics, when he launched his 2016 campaign by saying some migrants are rapists and bring drugs and crime.

“I took a lot of heat for saying it, but I was right,” Trump said Friday, repeating the claim that other countries are emptying their prisons and mental institutions and dumping their worst criminals in the United States.

To thunderous applause, he called for the death penalty “for any migrant that kills an American citizen or a law enforcement officer.”

Trump announced that as president he’d launch “Operation Aurora” to focus on deporting members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, or TDA. The violent gang traces its origins more than a decade to an infamously lawless prison with hardened criminals.

Trump also repeated his pledge to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that allows the president to deport any non-citizen who is from a country that the U.S. is at war with.

In July, the Biden administration issued a sanction against the gang and offered $12 million in rewards for the arrest of three leaders.

Some of Colorado’s Democratic leaders accused Trump and other Republicans of overstating problems in Aurora.

Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, also have put a spotlight on a community in Springfield, Ohio, where they said Haitian immigrants were accused of stealing and eating pets.

While Ohio and Colorado are not competitive in the presidential race, the Republican message on immigration is intended for states that are. Vance campaigned recently in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, a city of 70,000 that has resettled refugees from Africa and Asia, and touted Trump’s plan to ramp up deportations. He argues smaller communities have been “overrun” by immigrants taxing local resources.

Trump has vowed to deport not only “criminals,” a promise he shares with Harris, but also people he has denigrated as “pro-Hamas radicals” protesting on college campuses. Trump has said he would revoke the temporary protected status that allows Haitians to stay in the U.S. because of widespread poverty and violence in their home nation.

Harris has tacked to the right on immigration, presenting herself as a candidate who can be tough on policing the border, which is perceived as one of her biggest vulnerabilities.

She wrapped up a three-day western swing with a campaign event Friday in Scottsdale, Arizona, where Harris said she would create a bipartisan council of advisers to provide feedback on her policy initiatives if she makes it to the White House.

She also accused Trump of letting Iran “off the hook” while he was in office and made her case that she would be a greater champion for Israel’s security than the Republican nominee.

But Trump in fact during his time in office had ordered strikes against Iranian backed militias as well as a January 2020 operation that killed Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force.

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