Trump says immigrants who commit murder have ‘bad genes’ in ‘racist’ slam of migrants

Former President Donald Trump is claiming migrants who commit murder are predisposed to doing so because of “their genes.”

Trump made the comments while speaking on The Hugh Hewitt Show on Monday, claiming that 13,000 migrants who have entered the US are “murderers.”

“How about allowing people to come through an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers? Many of them murdered far more than one person,” Trump told the show’s host. “And they’re now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer — I believe this: it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now. Then you had 425,000 people come into our country that shouldn’t be here that are criminals.”

The Independent emailed Trump’s campaign for comment.

The numbers Trump cited refer to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data. In September, the agency told Congressional lawmakers that there are 13,000 immigrants convicted of homicide living outside of ICE detention. The 425,000 figure refers to the number of non-detained immigrants with criminal convictions that the agency had been tracking, according to a letter ICE sent to Texas Republican Representative Tony Gonzales.

Border crossings across the country have dropped this year and law enforcement officials say that not all of the migrants with criminal convictions arrived during President Joe Biden’s administration, per NBC News. Some are believed to have arrived during Trump’s presidency.

Research has suggested that immigrants are actually less likely to commit crimes than non-immigrants.

Trump escalated his rhetoric on migrants as immigration became a hot button topic during the presidential debate. During Trump’s debate against Harris on September 11, he repeated the baseless claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield Ohio are eating the dogs and cats of people living there.

In December, he claimed that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Biden’s campaign compared the remarks to those made by Adolf Hitler.

“Donald Trump channeled his role models as he parroted Adolf Hitler, praised Kim Jong Un, and quoted Vladimir Putin while running for president on a promise to rule as a dictator and threaten American democracy,” The campaign said in a statement at the time.

Trump’s recent comments faced backlash from social media commenters who called them “racist”.

“Where o where are geneticists, NIH, historians of eugenics, bioethicists to loudly condemn this racist crap,” Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at New York University, commented on X.

Maxine Clark, the former CEO of Build-A-Bear Workshop, also wrote on X: “How could anyone that is truly an American patriot say anything like this (or vote for this person) when immigrants built this country and continue to do so. This is DEPLORABLE.”

This article was amended on 14 October 2024. The headline previously stated that Trump had said immigrants had “bad genes,” however he was not referring to all immigrants but to those who had committed murder.