Donald Trump: Mexico deliberately sends criminals into US
Speaking to libertarians in Las Vegas, before headlining an event in Phoenix, Trump repeated his charge that Mexico was sending violent offenders to the US and that US officials were being “dumb” in dealing with immigrants living in the country illegally. “These people wreak havoc on our population,” he said at the libertarian gathering, FreedomFest, inside a Planet Hollywood ballroom on the Las Vegas Strip.
In the 4,200-capacity Phoenix convention centre, which was packed with flag-waving supporters, Trump momentarily took a different view and said: “I love the Mexican people. I love ’em. Many, many people from Mexico are legal. They came in the old-fashioned way. Legally.”
He quickly returned to the sharp tone that has brought him scorn as well as praise. “I respect Mexico greatly, as a country. But the problem we have is their leaders are much sharper than ours, and they’re killing us at the border and they’re killing us on trade.” His speeches in both venues were long on insulting critics and short on solving the problems he cited. When he called for a wall along the US-Mexico border, the audience in Las Vegas groaned.
Trump also said that he would have more positive results in dealing with China and Russia, if he were president, and said he could be friends with Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
Asked by an audience member in Las Vegas about US-Russia relations, Trump said that Putin doesn’t respect Obama. “I think we would get along very, very well,” he said.
Trump has turned to victims of crime to bolster his argument that immigrants illegally in the US have killed and raped. In Las Vegas and Phoenix, he brought on stage Jamiel Shaw snr, a Southern California man whose 17-year-old son was shot and killed in 2008 by an illegal immigrant. Shaw vividly described how his son was shot — in the head, stomach and hands, while trying to block his face — and how he heard the gunshots as he talked to his son on the phone.
Trump’s speeches were filled with tangents and insults levelled at business partners, such as Univision and NBC, which have dropped him because of his comments that Mexican immigrants bring drugs and crime to the US and are rapists. He also directed familiar barbs at Democrat presidential contender Hillary Clinton (“the worst secretary of state in the history of the country”), and at Obama (“such a divisive person”). He called journalists “terrible people.”
