Michael Wyke/AP
Donald Trump, the former President, delivers a speech at a campaign event in Houston on November 2, 2023.
CNN
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The upcoming speech by former President Donald Trump in Texas near the US-Mexico border is expected to involve an escalation of his anti-immigrant rhetoric and the promotion of hard-line immigration policy proposals.
The top contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination will join Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who is expected to endorse Trump at the event. Described as an official state visit, both Trump and Abbott are set to discuss plans to curb illegal immigration.
Trump’s rhetoric has intensified on the campaign trail, with promises of conducting the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history” if he wins the White House next year. He has made derogatory comments about undocumented immigrants, resembling White supremacist rhetoric, and has drawn comparisons between migrants and the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter.
“There’s never been anything like this. Our country is being invaded. This is an invasion,” Trump, who has made curtailing illegal immigration a cornerstone of his 2024 campaign, declared at a recent rally in Hialeah, Florida.
Trump is planning a widespread expansion of his administration’s hard-line immigration policies that would restrict both legal and illegal immigration, should he be elected to a second term. The plans include rounding up undocumented immigrants already in the US and placing them in detention camps to await deportation. Such a proposal would necessitate building large camps to house migrants waiting for deportation and tapping federal and local law enforcement to assist with arrests of undocumented immigrants across the country.
“Stopping the invasion at our southern border is an urgent national security necessity and one of President Trump’s top priorities. For that reason, he has laid out – in his own speeches and Agenda 47 platform – by far the most detailed program for securing the border, stopping illegal immigration, and removing those who should never have been allowed into our country in the first place,” a spokesperson for the Trump campaign said in a statement to CNN.
The former president has been using the Israel-Hamas war to incite fear and anti-immigrant sentiment within the US to advocate for an immigration crackdown. He has advocated for “ideological screenings” of immigrants, blocking immigrants and refugees from predominantly Muslim countries, and deporting people in the US on visas who he claims have “jihadist sympathies.”
