Trump: Open borders will end if I’m elected
Donald Trump, who has made a hard-line stance on immigration a centrepiece of his presidential campaign, has asserted that “not one more American life should be given up in the name of open borders”,
“All across this country, dining room tables have an empty seat because the government abandoned its duty and has not enforced its basic laws,” the Republican presidential nominee told a gathering of the Remembrance Project, a group founded to remember those killed by people living illegally in the US and to press for tougher laws.
“This has to end. This will end if I become president.”
Two dozen members of the organisation sat behind Trump as he spoke, and several told their stories, often gruesome, of how their loved ones lost their lives. Trump has appeared with members of the group several times, including during the speech to lay out his immigration policy in Arizona last month. He vowed to continue to “shine a national spotlight” on their work.
“Politicians ignore your cries, but I never will,” Trump said.
Maria Espinoza, founder of the group and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, praised Trump’s advocacy. But the Houston-based group has come under scrutiny for some of its pronouncements, including Espinoza’s false assertion that illegal immigrants kill 25 Americans a day.
Trump has long talked tough on immigration, deriding Mexico as a source of rapists and criminals in his campaign kick-off speech last year and vowing to build an impenetrable wall on the nation’s southern border. He is not proposing a pathway to legal status for people living in the country illegally but has backed away from his call for the mass deportation of millions of people who have not committed crimes beyond their immigration offences.
But he also ruled out what he dismissed as “amnesty,” saying those who want to live legally in the US will need to leave and head to the back of the line in their home countries.
Trump also hit back at the former defence secretary who called the Republican nominee “beyond repair” when it comes to national security.
Robert Gates, who served under presidents of both parties, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Trump is “stubbornly uninformed” about the world. Trump, at a rally in Colorado Springs, Colorado, called Gates “an absolute clown,” and insinuated he “probably has a problem we don’t know about”.
But Trump made no mention of either controversy that dominated the political world hours earlier: he did not address his decision to finally acknowledge that President Barack Obama was born in the U St or his call for Hillary Clinton’s Secret Service agents to drop their guns and then “let’s see what happens.”
