Former President Donald J. Trump said on Friday that if elected to a second term, he would begin his promised mass deportations of undocumented immigrants in two cities in Ohio and Colorado that have been the center of his baseless and exaggerated claims about migrants.
“We’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference at Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., on Friday afternoon. “And we’re going to start with Springfield and Aurora.”
In his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday night, Mr. Trump repeated an outlandish claim that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating the pets of local residents. Local officials have said there is no evidence for the claim, which began on social media. Mr. Trump and prominent right-wing influencers have fueled the spread of falsehoods, sharing memes, generated by artificial intelligence, of the former president saving cats.
Mr. Trump has continued to repeat the rumors, insisting again in a speech on Thursday that Haitian immigrants are abducting pets from residents. And his social media accounts have a series of digitally generated images of cats that he is rescuing or that are holding signs saying they support him over his rival, Ms. Harris.
Since the debate, Springfield has been at the center of a maelstrom. This week, bomb threats have led to the evacuation of city hall and multiple schools. But Mr. Trump on Friday dismissed the danger that his rhetoric might be posing to the city’s residents. “No, no,” he said. “The real threat is what’s happening at our border.”
President Biden on Friday denounced Mr. Trump for repeating the falsehoods about Haitian migrants, though did not mention the former president by name. “There’s no place in America,” Mr. Biden said. “This has to stop, what he’s doing. It has to stop.”
Allies of Mr. Trump have privately said that they believe the media’s fact-checking of the claims about Haitian migrants has served their purposes. It has highlighted Mr. Trump’s preferred campaign issue — illegal immigration, despite the fact that the Haitian migrants are in the country legally. He has long vowed mass deportations if re-elected, planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025.
His allies have also credited Republicans’ recent focus on Springfield with drawing attention to related problems there, including the pressure on its housing, schools and hospitals, as well as in other places that have had booming migrant populations in recent years.
Mr. Trump has also made exaggerated claims about migrant criminality in Aurora, Colo.
“We have millions of people pouring into our country,” he said at the debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday. “You look at Aurora in Colorado. They are taking over the towns. They’re taking over buildings. They’re going in violently.”
His statements about Aurora stemmed from a viral video of people carrying guns in a hallway of an apartment complex in the Colorado city, and reports about the Venezuelan gang TdA, or Tren de Aragua.
On Wednesday, the day after the debate, two Republican officials from Aurora issued a joint statement saying that claims about the gang were “overstated.”
The gang “has not ‘taken over’ the city,” said Mike Coffman, the city’s mayor, and Danielle Jurinsky, a council member and the chair of the council’s Public Safety, Courts and Civil Service Policy Committee.
“The overstated claims fueled by social media and through select news organizations are simply not true,” they added. “Again, TdA’s presence in Aurora is limited to specific properties, all of which the city has been addressing in various ways for months.”
Their statement to clear up the misinformation was also endorsed by the Aurora Police Department.
Even as Mr. Trump has portrayed both Aurora and Springfield as dangerous areas overrun by crime, he still said he would be open to holding campaign events in both places. “We could, and maybe we’ll do that.”
The post Trump Pledges to Start Migrant Deportations in Ohio and Colorado appeared first on New York Times.