Donald Trump suggested Monday that people in the country illegally who have committed murder and other crimes have “bad genes,” the latest example of rhetoric by the former president that dehumanizes immigrants and disparages them in racial terms.
Trump made the comment during an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt while criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris’s record on border security. Trump accused her of “allowing people to come through an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers” — repeating a claim that significantly distorts data recently released by the federal government.
“You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes,” Trump said. “And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now. They had 425,000 people come into our country that shouldn’t be here, that are criminals.”
After the interview, a Trump campaign spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement that Trump was “clearly referring to murderers, not migrants.”
The White House denounced Trump’s comments about “bad genes.”
“That type of language is hateful, it’s disgusting, it’s inappropriate and has no place in our country,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said during the daily press briefing Monday.
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