by Former President Donald J. Trump, in an interview broadcast on Fox News on Sunday, falsely suggested that Latin American governments were picking off unwanted citizens and sending them to the U.S. border, resurrecting a claim that was central to his campaign. 2016. campaign.
He also accused the Chinese Communist Party (without providing any evidence) of orchestrating illegal immigration to the United States and said he believed China would try to interfere in the presidential election, adding that he liked President Xi Jinping “a lot.”
When asked by interviewer Maria Bartiromo if he thought “military-age men” from China were “being ordered by the Communist Party to come here,” Trump said, “I think so.”
Referring to a recent incident in New York City in which a group of men identified by police officials as immigrants from Latin America attacked police officers, Trump said: “The bosses of these countries are smart. They don’t send people who are doing great work and who are loved in the country. “They are sending people, for the most part, who they don’t want, and they are putting them in caravans.”
That statement echoed one of the most incendiary lines from his first campaign speech in 2015: “When Mexico sends its people, they don’t send the best,” he said at the time, continuing: “They’re bringing drugs. They are bringing crime. They are rapists. And I guess some of them are good people.” He has also repeatedly and falsely said that immigrants from South and Central America come from “mental institutions” and prisons.
Trump also spoke approvingly, as he has before, of the military-style mass deportation of Mexican immigrants under President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
“He was very firm on deportation, because a lot of people were coming into our country illegally, and he started a big mass deportation,” Trump said. “He left them very close to the border and they returned. Then he left them 2,000 miles away and they did not return.”
The mass deportations are part of an extreme expansion of anti-immigration policy that Trump is planning if he is elected again.
The interview took place on Thursday, before Saturday’s military strikes against multiple sites in Yemen controlled by Houthi militants.
While much of the conversation focused on immigration and international affairs, domestic politics was also discussed.
Bartiromo asked Trump about Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, with whom he has had a difficult relationship. He suggested that he would like to see her replaced. “I think she did well at first on the Republican National Committee,” he said. “I would say right now there will probably be some changes made.”
He spoke as the party gathered in Las Vegas for its annual meeting, where the conversation was largely about Trump’s control over the RNC and McDaniel’s future as its leader. Trump first recommended McDaniel for president in 2016, and she served as a loyal leader throughout the 2020 election cycle and beyond. The two have communicated directly and frequently even when they have disagreed. Trump, for example, refused to participate in any of the party’s primary debates this cycle, and his team publicly pressured the party to cancel future debates.
In a separate interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Trump’s latest Republican primary opponent, Nikki Haley, repeated an attack she has made several times over the past two weeks, accusing Trump of ” playing politics with the edge.” Trump has been loudly trying to kill a bipartisan deal on immigration and border security in Congress.
“You shouldn’t get involved and tell Republicans to wait until the election because we don’t want this to help Biden win,” Ms. Haley said, adding: “You are absolutely playing politics by telling them to do nothing. “
He recanted earlier comments in which he had said that Texas had the right to secede, even though the Supreme Court ruled in 1869 that unilateral secession was unconstitutional.
The discussion over secession arose from a recent Supreme Court decision that allowed the Biden administration to remove a concertina wire barrier that Texas had placed along the southern border.
“Texas has talked about secession for a long time,” Haley said. “The Constitution does not allow that.” But she suggested that she understood the impulse because “people don’t believe the government is listening to them.”
Mrs. Haley too appeared on “Saturday Night Live,” appearing in a skit as a “South Carolina voter” at a Trump town hall on CNN, asking why he refused to debate her.
Shane Goldmacher contributed with reports.
