Trump threatens troops at Mexico border
▶ US president pledges up to 15,000 soldiers to be sent to meet ‘invasion’
President Donald Trump further hardened his pre-election anti-immigration rhetoric in a Florida campaign stop on Wednesday, after threatening to deploy as many as 15,000 soldiers on the Mexican border – equal to the size of the US contingent in Afghanistan.
“They got a lot of rough people in these caravans. They are not angels,” he said in Fort Myers, referring to migrants from poor Central American countries moving towards the United States in hopes of a better life or to escape violence. “We’re gettin’ prepared for the caravan, folks,” he said.
Brushing aside accusations that his divisive rhetoric on immigration is stoking extremism, Trump made the troop announcement before flying to Florida for the last stage of campaigning ahead of next Tuesday’s midterm elections.
He will host 11 rallies across eight states in the next six days.
Trump hopes to fire up core Republican voters and spur the party to retain dominance of both chambers of Congress. Democrats are threatening to light a fire under Trump’s feet if they win even partial control, raising the specter of a more brutal Washington politics.
Trump’s core message to his raucous supporters is the near daily warning that America is under attack from an “invasion” of illegal immigrants and that Democrats would throw open the borders.
On Tuesday Trump announced more than 5,000 active duty soldiers were being sent. On Wednesday he told reporters at the White House: “We’ll do up to anywhere between 10 and 15,000 military personnel.”
Trump frequently describes illegal immigrants – a tiny minority of whom have formed groups to attempt walking hundreds of miles to the US border – as “rapists” and “thugs.”
“It’s a dangerous group of people,” Trump said of the latest group of a few thousand migrants, still deep inside Mexico far from their goal. “They’re not coming into our country.”
The number of illegal immigrants intercepted in 2018 was 400,000, 25 percent of the 1.6 million figure in 2000, according to Department of Homeland Security figures.
Trump’s nationalist – or what critics say is racist – rhetoric was engulfed in controversy last week when an alleged anti-Semitic fanatic gunned down 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue.