Video of cop killer featured in new Trump campaign push
WASHINGTON (AP) — The president’s re-election campaign released a new ad Friday that borrows liberally from an expletive-filled, antiimmigration video that was denounced as racist.
The new ad, tweeted by Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, warns ominously that a caravan of migrants that has been traveling toward the US must be stopped.
And it includes footage of Luis Bracamontes, a twicedeported immigrant from Mexico sentenced to death in California for killing two police officers.
”Dangerous illegal criminals like cop-killer Luis Bracamontes don’t care about our laws,” the narrator says against footage of the caravan, which remains hundreds of miles from the southern border.
“America cannot allow this invasion. The migrant caravan must be stopped.”
The decision to use the footage in an official campaign ad is the latest of Trump’s election-week efforts to stoke fear and anti-immigrant sentiment in hopes of motivating Republicans to vote Tuesday.
And it comes amid a frenzy of hardline immigration proposals he has pushed in the final stages of the campaign, including sending troops to the border and revoking birthright citizenship.
Bracamontes was also featured in an ad Trump tweeted Wednesday that was widely seen as reminiscent of the infamous 1988 “Willie Horton” ad used against Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis and condemned as racist.
Trump had said earlier Friday the video was tough “but correct.”
”I don’t view it as the Willie Horton ad at all,” the president told The Washington
Times in an interview published Friday. “I think it’s just an ad where somebody is a bad guy, came in illegally, twice, and we can’t do that.”
Parscale said the new ad would start running nationally Friday night and the campaign had purchased $1.5 million in airtime to run it.