Donald Trump is detouring from the battleground states Friday to visit a Colorado suburb that's been in the news over illegal immigration. He's often using false or misleading claims to drive a message that migrants are causing chaos in smaller American cities and towns.
Trump's rally in Aurora will mark 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 a core of 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, where tensions are flaring locally over resources and some longtime residents are expressing distrust about sudden demographic changes.
Aurora entered the spotlight in August when a video circulated showing armed men walking through an apartment building housing Venezuelan migrants. Trump has claimed extensively that Venezuelan gangs are taking over buildings, even though authorities say that was a single block of the suburb, and the area is again safe.
Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, also have spread falsehoods about a community in Springfield, Ohio, where Haitian immigrants were accused of stealing and eating pets.
"It's like an invasion from within, and we're going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country, and we're going to start with Springfield and Aurora," Trump said last month in a news conference in California.
While Ohio and Colorado are not competitive in the presidential race, the Republican message on immigration is intended for small towns in states that are. Vance campaigned recently in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, which has resettled refugees from Africa and Asia in recent months, 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 Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic rival, but also Haitians living legally in Springfield and even 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.
Trump repeatedly faults Harris and President Joe Biden for allowing record high numbers of arrivals, saying that is fueling violent crime, though numbers show a continued downward trend after a coronavirus pandemic-era crime spike.
On the campaign trail, Trump uses specific cases of murders or attacks where suspects are immigrants who arrived in the country illegally. He has referred to them as "animals," and earlier this week suggested that those suspected in homicide cases "have bad genes."
Chris Haynes, an associate professor of political science at University of New Haven, who wrote a book about public opinion on immigration policies and has studied the former president's messaging on immigration, says that is part of what he calls "episodic branding." It may prompt some moderate voters to reassess who they want to support, he said.
"What's worked for him from the very beginning is to vilify immigrants, but also to try to make people feel like they're a threat," said Haynes, saying some of the rhetoric also appeals to low propensity voters that are part of his base.
Just as Biden did before he abandoned his reelection bid, Democrat 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.
"What Kamala has done with illegal migrants is the biggest crime story of our time because hundreds of thousands of people are going to be victims very shortly," Trump said in a recent speech in Erie, Pennsylvania, before saying he would send federal law enforcement "to liberate every Pennsylvania town and every town in the United States of America that has been taken over by migrant gangs."
Jeffrey Balogh, a resident of Erie, said at that event that he feels strongly about Trump's proposals on immigration. He shared that he felt uncomfortable recently when he went to rent chairs from a business and five men who spoke a foreign language were standing outside waiting for a bus.
"Not one spoke a lick of English," he said. "You see a whole different environment."
___
Gomez reported from Fort Lauderdale, Florida.