Washington, DC —The stakes, contrasts, and strategies of the presidential campaign are in sharp relief as we hit 100 days out. On immigration, xenophobic lies, disinformation, and related ugliness is central to the right wing and Republican political strategy and they are openly asserting and promising unsparing mass roundups, mass detentions and mass deportations of even long-settled U.S. immigrants as the core of enacting that vision.
According to Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice:
“With fewer than 100 days left in the presidential campaign, the stakes could not be higher and the contrasts couldn’t be more sharp or consequential. The right wing portrayal of immigration and immigrants as a national extinction-level crisis is telling and ugly. It’s part of a dark and dystopian vision that believes the failed and racist 1950s policy of mass deportation should be expanded and brought to 21st century America, despite the cost in lives, in separated families, and damage to our economy and communities across the nation. As an organization, our ‘candidate’ is immigration reform and fighting for an America that recognizes immigrants and immigration as national strengths. The contrasts on immigration go beyond the policy realm and straight to fundamentally different visions for our nation and our future as a multiracial democracy.”
Below are a few of the key stories that caught our eye in recent days that underscore the ongoing right wing attempts to stoke fear and spread conspiracies and disinformation while pushing for a mass deportation agenda:
- Will Carless in USA Today, “Project 2025 decried as racist. Some contributors have trail of racist writings, activity.“ The story notes, “Failed Virginia GOP Senate candidate Corey Stewart, another named contributor, has long associated with white supremacists and calls himself a protector of America’s Confederate history tasked with ‘taking back our heritage.’ … The 2009 PhD thesis of Project 2025 contributor Jason Richwine was titled, ‘IQ and Immigration Policy.’ The thesis includes statements such as: ‘No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.’” America’s Voice has a long record of monitoring Stewart’s political activities – see here.
- Reporting in The Guardian, “Donald Trump accused of falsely vilifying migrants for surge in US fentanyl deaths.”: “A former head of US border security has accused Donald Trump of “exploiting” the pain of the opioid epidemic to wrongly vilify migrants as responsible for the surge in American deaths from fentanyl during recent years. But the Trump campaign is expected to double down on the deception now that the vice-president, Kamala Harris, whom Republicans describe as Joe Biden’s “border czar” and accuse of inaction over a surge of illegal immigration, is likely to be the Democratic presidential candidate in November … Trump claimed that hundreds of thousands of people have been killed by fentanyl smuggled across the border by migrants entering the US illegally.” America’s Voice has tracked fentanyl as a political issue and false connections to immigration for a number of years.
- Trump’s running mate JD Vance, reiterating the plans for unsparing mass deportations and warning undocumented migrants, “If you are here, start packing your bags right now because Donald J. Trump is coming back into office.” See a more complete reminder of Trump’s mass deportation plans here.
