Only a “disabled” person would open the US border to tens of thousands of “murderers,” the former president has told his supporters
Former US President Donald Trump has labeled Vice President Kamala Harris “mentally impaired” for immigration policies that apparently allowed more than 400,000 convicted criminals to walk freely into the US.
According to data released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) earlier this week, 425,431 convicted criminals and 222,141 people with pending criminal charges entered the US illegally and are living free inside the country while awaiting court hearings or deportation proceedings.
These include 62,231 convicted of assault, 56,533 with drug convictions, and 13,099 convicted of homicide. An additional 15,811 have sexual assault convictions.
At a campaign rally in Wisconsin on Saturday, Trump declared that Harris should be “impeached and removed from office” for allowing this many criminals into the country.
Harris let in “some of the worst murderers you’ve ever seen,” he claimed, “and that’s not even mentioning the rapists, the gang members, the drug dealers, the child predators, and the traffickers in women.”
“[President] Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way. She was born that way. And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country,” he said.
It is unclear whether all of the criminals mentioned by ICE entered the US while Biden and Harris were in office. However, one of Biden’s first acts as president was to reinstate the Obama-era policy of ‘catch and release’, under which illegal migrants entering the US are detained, and then immediately released with orders to show up at immigration hearings years in the future. Under Trump, migrants arrested by law enforcement agents were taken straight to detention centers from 2019 onwards.
There were around 10.2 million illegal immigrants living in the US in 2020. Under Biden, who tasked Harris in 2021 with overseeing border security, at least 10.6 million more have entered the country, according to US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) figures.
The 425,431 convicted criminals counted by ICE are drawn from a list of over 7 million migrants who are awaiting removal proceedings but are not in custody. As such, the true number of criminal aliens living in the US could be vastly higher.
Voters concerned about immigration overwhelmingly trust Trump to tackle the issue. In a bid to close this gap, Harris has distanced herself from past comments on immigration – for example, comparing ICE to the Ku Klux Klan and chanting “down with deportation” at a protest. During a visit to the US-Mexico border on Saturday, Harris vowed to step up deportations and deny asylum to migrants who cross the border outside legal entry points.
