On Tuesday night, several of Donald Trump’s former rivals endorsed the Trump ticket, including former Ambassador Nikki Haley, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Vivek Ramaswamy. Much of the evening focused on the Republican Party’s hard-line border and immigration policies. The 2024 Republican platform backs Trump’s pledge to carry out the “largest deportation operation in American history” and to stop what it calls a “migrant crime epidemic.” We speak with journalist Jean Guerrero, who says what was shown at the RNC was the “politics of hate” and that the Republican Party is not letting up on its “anti-immigrant hatemongering.”
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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency: Breaking with Convention.” I’m Amy Goodman. We’re broadcasting from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from the Republican National Convention.
On Tuesday night, several of Donald Trump’s former rivals endorsed the Trump-Vance ticket. Speakers at the RNC included former Ambassador Nikki Haley, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Much of the evening focused on the party’s hard-line border and immigration policies. The 2024 Republican platform backs Trump’s pledge to carry out, quote, “the largest deportation operation in American history,” unquote, and to stop what it calls a “migrant crime epidemic.” This is Texas Senator Ted Cruz speaking last night.
SEN. TED CRUZ: Never before has an election mattered so much. We are facing an invasion on our southern border — not figuratively, a literal invasion. Eleven-point-five million people have crossed our border illegally under Joe Biden. Every day Americans are dying, murdered, assaulted, raped by illegal immigrants that the Democrats have released. Teenage girls and boys wearing colored wristbands are being sold into a life of sex slavery. This is evil, and it’s wrong. And it is happening every damn day. Today, as a result of Joe Biden’s presidency, your family is less safe, your children are less safe, the country is less safe. But here’s the good news: We can fix it. And when Donald Trump is president, we will fix it.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz, speaking here in Milwaukee at the Republican National Convention last night. There’s no data linking immigrants to rising crime.
For more, we’re joined by Jean Guerrero, contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, author of the book Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda. Her latest piece is headlined “How Biden Can Win Over Young Latinos.” She’s a senior fellow at the UCLA Latina Futures 2050 Lab and a former opinion columnist at the Los Angeles Times. She’s joining us from Los Angeles.
Jean, welcome back to Democracy Now! Why don’t you summarize your response to what Ted Cruz was saying, in particular? And, overall, the theme of last night was the issue of immigration and safety, as they put it, immigration and crime, Jean.
JEAN GUERRERO: Exactly. Great to be here, Amy.
What we saw last night was the politics of hate. The Republican Party is not letting up on its deceptive anti-immigrant hatemongering. Again, this is a politics of hate, that is rooted in the deceptive demonization of one of the most vulnerable groups in the United States, which is immigrants.
And Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s speech was one of the most debased and deceptive of the week. He listed example after example of Americans being killed by immigrants, which, as you noted, Amy, immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than people who are born in the United States. Data consistently shows this. But this is a strategy that has been used by Trump, and it’s straight out of the playbook of Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller, which is to take aberrant examples, unusual examples of crimes and to paint them as the norm. This is a strategy that was used by the Nazis to vilify Jewish people and other groups that they didn’t like. They published lists of crimes committed by these people to create the false notion that these are monsters, that they’re subhuman, that they’re a threat to society.
And this is what we saw last night, that even in the wake of Trump’s assassination attempt, the Republican Party is not letting up on its anti-immigrant hatemongering, on its very dangerous and deceptive rhetoric, which is not surprising, given that when Trump was shot, he was in the middle of anti-immigrant hatemongering. If he hadn’t turned to look at that chart showing border crossing statistics, he might be dead. So, as the Republican Party is painting Trump as the victim of demonization by the left, Trump and the Republican Party continue with its classic anti-immigrant hatemongering, which is endangering this group of people and Latinos across the United States who come from mixed-status families.
AMY GOODMAN: And we should say, as Senator Cruz spoke, as Nikki Haley spoke, as our next clip we’re going to play of a mom who lost her son to fentanyl spoke, President Trump was there sitting next to J.D. Vance, and President Trump had a........