Trump stokes fear of illegal immigrants

As mid-term elections loom, Republicans playing on Ameerican voter’s fears

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s closing argument is now clear: Build tent cities for migrants. End birthright citizenship. Fear the caravan. Send active-duty troops to the border. Refuse asylum.

Immigration has been the animating force of the Trump presidency, and now — facing the possibility that Republicans will lose control of Congress on Tuesday — the president has fully embraced a dark, anti-immigrant message in the hope that stoking fear will motivate voters to show up for his party’s candidates across the country.

Eager to shift the national conversation away from the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre and the pipe bombs delivered by a Trump supporter, the president’s political team has in recent days urged him to use his bully pulpit to ratchet up the nation’s sense of alarm about the dangers of migrants heading for the border.

It did not take much convincing. On Wednesday afternoon, Trump tweeted out an inflammatory 53-second campaign ad featuring a Hispanic murder suspect laughing about killing police officers as images show migrants surging past barriers in Central America. The president did little to hide his intentions: Immigrants will kill you and the Democrats are to blame.

“It is outrageous what the Democrats are doing to our Country,” Trump wrote in the tweet. “Vote Republican now!”

White House officials said the president would underscore those same themes Thursday afternoon when he was expected to deliver remarks about unauthorized immigration and the need for heightened border security before his departure for an evening campaign rally in Missouri.