Former President Donald Trump called for the death penalty to punish sex traffickers during a campaign event Thursday at the southern border, where he said Vice President Kamala Harris and her fellow Democrats had “unleashed a deadly plague of migrant crime on our country by not doing their jobs.”
Trump also expanded his repertoire of personal attacks on Harris by saying she lacked the work ethic to handle the nation’s immigration crisis. He has been urged by informal advisers and other Republicans to focus more on policy, but he has defended his continued personal-attack strategy.
Standing at the border fence in Cochise County in Arizona, he falsely claimed that Harris is President Joe Biden’s “border czar.” Harris was tasked with a broader diplomatic mission of addressing the reasons migrants flee their home countries in the first place and was never appointed border czar.
“She loved the title but she didn’t want to do the work, because she’s lazy,” Trump said Thursday. “And probably more importantly than being lazy, she wants to have an open border.”
A spokesperson for Harris declined to comment.
Trump falsely claimed that Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, who is Harris’ running mate, “signed a bill” to require tampons in boys’ bathrooms.
The former president also made a rare acknowledgment that he lost the 2020 election.
As at most of his public events for the past three years, Trump referenced the “horrible election” in 2020 that cost him a second term. But instead of casting doubts on the results, he noted the defeat.
“I got many millions more votes than I got the first time, but didn’t quite make it — just a little bit short,” Trump said.
Responding to a question from a reporter, Trump said he had not spoken recently with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about the possibility of an endorsement from the independent presidential candidate. But Trump, ignoring the months of attacks he made against Kennedy, said that he had “a lot of respect for RFK Jr.,” and called him “very smart.”
Still, much of Trump’s remarks detailed his view of the crisis along the southern border.
Joining him at the event were the relatives of people whom the police say were attacked by immigrants in the country illegally. They included the family of a 12-year-old Houston girl, Jocelyn Nungaray, whose body was found in a drainage ditch in June. Authorities arrested two recent Venezuelan migrants and charged them in the killing. Also standing alongside Trump were relatives of Rachel Morin, 37, who the police say was raped and killed last year while jogging in Maryland.
Trump, who has vowed to lead the “largest deportation effort in American history” if elected to a second term, said he would call for a 10-year minimum sentence for human smuggling and the death penalty for “anyone guilty of child or woman sex trafficking.”
Trump visited part of the Tucson sector of the border, a 260-mile stretch that has been one of the busiest sections of the 2,000-mile border with Mexico.
Border apprehensions overall have generally declined since hitting a record 250,000 in December. But as crossings have dropped in other areas, including in Texas, the numbers have continued to climb here. Border officials recorded roughly 441,000 apprehensions in the Tucson sector in the current fiscal year, up nearly 61% from about 274,000 the year before.
Trump spoke just feet from a towering metal fence that officials said was erected while he was president. On one side of him were stacks of steel bars that Trump said illustrated the Biden administration’s failure to continue building his border wall.
After arriving, Trump had a briefing with representatives from the National Border Patrol Council, the main union for Border Patrol agents, including its past president, Brandon Judd, who has long supported Trump. He also spoke briefly with local law enforcement officials from Cochise County and Sierra Vista, Arizona.
Trump’s event at the border in Arizona was his fourth stop in a battleground state this week, part of an effort by his campaign to shift focus from the Democratic National Convention and highlight issues where Republicans believe they hold an edge.
But whereas other events this week have been in front of crowds, if modest ones, he was greeted here by fewer than a dozen people, and his remarks were largely addressed to a sizable contingent of reporters rather than a group of his supporters or campaign staff.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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