LAS VEGAS- Donald Trump visited steamy Sin City on Sunday for his first rally since becoming a convicted felon, brandishing harsh rhetoric about illegal immigration and occasionally touching on his own run-ins with the law.
Speaking at an outdoor event in a park about six miles from the Las Vegas Strip, Trump called Nevada, a key battleground state, a “dumping ground” for illegal immigrants and criticized the President Joe Biden for unleashing a “nightmare” through his border policies that he argued were “totally destroying” Black and Hispanic Americans.
“Nevada residents have had a front-row seat to Joe Biden’s evil and criminal erasure of our southern border,” Trump told the crowd. “It was criminal what he did.”
The speech came just days after Biden announced his executive order on immigration aimed at closing the U.S.-Mexico border when border crossings exceed 2,500 people per day. Trump dismissed the order as a “little plan” that was “pro-invasion, pro-child trafficking, pro-woman trafficking, pro-human trafficking, pro-drug traffickers and all the deaths that ‘they lead and pro-illegal immigration’. He cited cases of violent crimes allegedly committed by people not authorized to live in the United States.
“It’s weak, it’s ineffective, it’s bullshit what he signed,” Trump said, before his supporters erupted in chants of “Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.”
The same day he made the comments, the Trump campaign launched the renaming of its Latino outreach effort, from “Latinos for Trump” to “Latin Americans for Trump” — in a state where Latinos make up a bloc critical and influential electoral and as Republicans. continue to make inroads among Latinos.
Trump has promised if re-elected that he would carry out mass deportations, end citizenship rights and reinstate his ban on entry into the United States on people from certain majority-Muslim countries. In February, he also encouraged congressional Republicans to reject a bipartisan immigration deal backed by Biden.
Trump at one point Sunday referred to the first family as the “Biden crime family” and raised the fact that Biden had kept classified documents after his vice presidency, although special counsel did not recommend charges. (Trump is currently facing charges for allegedly hoarding classified documents and obstructing the investigation into the matter.) Conversely, Trump has downplayed the convictions of the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6, calling them victims and “J6 warriors”.
Trump’s Las Vegas rally caps a four-day tour of the West Coast and Southwest. On Thursday, Trump spoke at a town hall in Phoenix, where he denounced Biden’s actions at the border, then separately spent several days in California courting donors. He also hosted a major fundraiser in Vegas on Saturday night.
His increasingly inciting language about illegal immigration – where, at one point on Sunday, he claimed that “the invasion is…
