Trump heads to US-Mexico border as he escalates anti-immigrant rhetoric

Former President Donald Trump is scheduled to give a speech Sunday in Texas near the US-Mexico border as he escalates his anti-immigrant rhetoric and campaigns on hard-line immigration policy proposals.

The front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination will appear alongside Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who is expected to endorse Trump at the event. The trip is being dubbed as an official state visit, and both Trump and Abbott are expected to discuss plans for curbing illegal immigration.

Trump has been ramping up his rhetoric on the campaign trail, promising to conduct the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history” if he wins the White House next year. He has said that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” in comments that echoed White supremacist rhetoric and has compared migrants who come to the US to 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 pointing to the Israel-Hamas war to stoke fear and anti-immigrant sentiment within the US to advocate an immigration crackdown. He’s pushed for “ideological screenings” of immigrants, blocking immigrants and refugees from predominantly Muslim countries, and deporting people in the US on visas who he argues have “jihadist sympathies.”