Donald Trump’s xenophobia knows no limits. Last Saturday, during a speech before an evangelical group in Washington DC, the former president claimed to have proposed creating a “league of migrant fighters” to fight each other. The Republican Party candidate for this November’s elections said that he suggested it to Dana White, leader of the largest mixed martial arts championship in the United States and one of his allies. “I told Dana, I have an idea for you to make a lot of money. You’re going to go and start a new league of migrant fighters. Only for migrants,” Trump said.
Trump continued, referring to the championship presided over by White, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC): “And then at the end of the year the champion of your league — these are the best fighters in the world — has to fight the champion of migrants. I think the migrants could win. “That’s how tough they are.” According to Trump himself, White “didn’t like the idea too much.” But in his own opinion, “it’s not the worst idea” he’s ever had. “They are tough people,” the Republican justified.
During his speech, the former president referred to the migrant community with the same dehumanizing language that he has been using for years, since his presidential campaign in 2016 until just last week. Staying true to his script, Trump reiterated that the migrants who come to the United States “come from prisons” and “mental institutions” and are mostly “drug dealers,” “gang members” and “murderers in many different ways.” . A few days earlier, in a podcast recorded last Wednesday and published on Thursday, the Republican had said exactly the same thing, adding that migrants are also “terrorists.”
There are too many times that Trump has despised and insulted the immigrant community in the last months of the campaign. He has done it at rallies, through his social networks, in interviews… on any platform where they give him a microphone. And migration, especially irregular migration, has been a central axis of his campaign against President Joe Biden. Trump has promised to close the country’s southern border and carry out “the largest internal deportation operation in American history” if he wins the November election. Regarding this last promise, the Republican has assured that he would have no problem using the military to fulfill it.
At the Washington event, Trump also threw daggers at the Biden administration, accusing the Democratic president, as usual, of not doing enough to secure the country’s southern border. “Day after day, week after week, Joe Biden is releasing illegal criminals into our communities to rape, loot and kill,” Trump said, adding: “They are destroying our country.”
The Republican went on to mention several violent events in which the accused suspects are foreigners, which he calls “Biden migrant crimes”, or crimes committed by migrants under the Democrat Administration. “It is a new category of crimes,” he said. One of those she mentioned was last week’s murder of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray in Houston, Texas, for which two Venezuelans, who recently entered the country, were arrested and charged. “They crossed our border claiming that they feared for their lives in Venezuela, but you know, crime in Venezuela has dropped 72% because they have brought all the criminals to the United States,” said the former president.
