Writer Jean Guerrero on Anti-Immigrant Lies and Fearmongering at RNC

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared at democracynow.org, and excerpts from the original are republished here under Creative Commons license 3.0.

AMY GOODMAN: On July 16 [at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee], several of Donald Trump’s former rivals endorsed the Trump-Vance ticket….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 “the largest deportation operation in American history,” 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. 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: I want to go to another speaker at the RNC last night, and that was Anne Fundner of Southern California, who said her son Weston’s fentanyl overdose death was because Biden opened, quote, “our borders.” This is a clip:

ANNE FUNDNER: We did everything right. I had those conversations with him, and fentanyl still found my son. And on February 27th, 2022, our lives were shattered, and our baby was gone. This was not an overdose; it was a poisoning. His whole future, everything we ever wanted for him, was ripped away in an instant. And Joe Biden does nothing. I hold Joe Biden, Kamala Harris — the border czar, what a joke — and Gavin Newsom, and every Democrat who supports open borders, responsible for the death of my son.

AMY GOODMAN: In fact, data shows fentanyl is largely smuggled by U.S. citizens across U.S. ports of entry. Jean Guerrero, this is a statistic that you talk about. The statistic is 90%?

JEAN GUERRERO: Exactly, about 90% of fentanyl is actually smuggled through ports of entry, not through the desert, and it’s smuggled by U.S. citizens, not by immigrants. So the Republican Party is misusing a legitimate tragedy to manipulate perceptions about what is happening at the border.

This woman’s son, Weston, should not have died. It is a tragedy that he died. However, this blame on “open borders” is misleading, to say the least, because the border, first of all, is not open. Biden has deployed more Border Patrol agents than any president in U.S. history. They have had record fentanyl seizures under his administration. And again, when fentanyl is smuggled across the border, it is smuggled through ports of entry, which are always open. And there’s — yeah, the Trump administration also kept the ports of entry open because you have legitimate commercial traffic that needs to be coming across the borders. And that is where the fentanyl is being smuggled, not through the desert.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you respond to Senator Cruz saying that immigrants commit murders, I think he said, “every damn day”?

JEAN GUERRERO: That’s extremely deceptive. Again, immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than people who are born in the United States. They have a lot more to lose, particularly undocumented immigrants. The statistics consistently show that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes. And so, this idea that they’re committing crimes every day is just absolutely bonkers.

But it’s a strategy that is very classic Stephen Miller. My book was about Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller. And one of the things that they did under the Trump administration was they created an office called the VOICE. It was for the victims of immigration crimes. And it was constantly publishing lists of immigrants committing crimes, which, again, creates the false notion that they’re out there disproportionately committing crimes, when in fact that is not the case.

And if you wanted to demonize somebody based on a statistical fact, you might choose, for example, the fact that white men are disproportionately responsible for mass shootings. But, of course, you don’t see anybody advocating for the mass detention or deportation of white men, because that would be crazy. And again, this is based on a completely false notion that immigrants are more likely to commit crimes, which is — it’s just not the case.

AMY GOODMAN: Kari Lake, who’s running for Arizona’s Senate seat left vacant by Kyrsten Sinema, kicked off the RNC on Tuesday night, lashing out against the media and her Senate race opponent, Congressmember Ruben Gallego:

KARI LAKE: You [the media] have spent the last eight years lying about President Donald Trump and his — and his amazing patriotic supporters. Actually, guys, they lie about everything. They’ve lied about Joe Biden’s health, the economy, the laptop, the border. I could go on and on and on. But the really good news is that every day more and more people are turning off the fake news. And they’re — that’s right. And Americans are waking up to the truth about the disastrous Democrat policies pushed by Joe Biden and his favorite congressman, my opponent, Ruben Gallego.

These guys, they are full — they’re full of bad ideas. Just last week, Ruben Gallego voted to let the millions of people who poured into our country illegally cast a ballot in this upcoming election. Gallego and the Democrats have handed over control of my state Arizona’s border to the drug cartels. And because of them, criminals and deadly drugs are pouring in, and our children are dying. Our children are getting their hands on these drugs and dying.

AMY GOODMAN: Kari Lake falsely said that her opponent, the Congressmember Ruben Gallego, “voted to let millions of people who poured into our country illegally cast a ballot in this upcoming election.” However, she did not mention that it’s already banned by federal law for noncitizens to vote. Lake is a former TV news anchor who lost Arizona’s governor’s race and has since become a face for Trump’s 2020 election denial movement. Jean Guerrero, her comments?

JEAN GUERRERO: Gallego is a moderate on immigration. And what the Republican Party does is, regardless of whether you are a moderate, which is the case with Biden — you know, he has, as I mentioned earlier, increased border security to unprecedented levels. But regardless of whether you take a moderate stance on immigration, they’re going to say that you have opened the borders, that you are in favor of people coming across the border without any sort of security measures, without any enforcement. And that’s just simply not the case.

But they are heavily leaning on this because they have nothing else to offer the American people. It’s a scapegoating politics, which is rooted in stoking fear and stoking hate and creating the impression that there’s a dystopic reality at the border, which simply is not the case. You know, Trump promised to shut down the border, and he was not able to build the wall that he said he was going to build, because it’s physically impossible to build a 2,000-mile structure along the terrain that exists at the border.

So, President Biden is doing the best that he can, and Democrats like Gallego are in favor of moderate immigration strategies that embrace certain levels of border security. And the Republican Party simply takes that completely out of context, ignores that, and claims that they’re in favor of open borders, which is just absolutely not the case.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to another clip. We’re on the floor of the convention at night. This is another Arizona delegate, named Stacey Goodman, who spoke with Democracy Now!’s Renée Feltz.

RENÉE FELTZ: — …Can i ask you another question about immigration? It seems like it’s a major topic tonight. Is it a big one for you?

STACEY GOODMAN: Well, yeah. I’m all for people coming into this country and supporting this country, speaking English, assimilating. What we have — and I’m from a border state — we have open borders. We have illegal immigrants coming in here, killing, raping and maiming our children. OK? That is not acceptable. The border wall —

RENÉE FELTZ: But you’re saying that’s not all of them?

STACEY GOODMAN: The border wall needs to be finished. Joe Biden, had he just left that alone, we would have had a complete border wall. The blood is on Joe Biden’s hands and his administration’s.

RENÉE FELTZ: Just real quick, there are some people who have drawn attention to reports that show that U.S.-born citizens are much more likely to commit crimes than immigrants.

STACEY GOODMAN: That’s a lie. That’s an out-and-out lie. I don’t know where you’re getting your information from, but it’s a lie.

RENÉE FELTZ: One, I got it from a study that was done by Northwestern, who used census data.

STACEY GOODMAN: No. No. No, not buying it.

RENÉE FELTZ: And one other — 

STACEY GOODMAN: I was a police officer for 21 years. I will tell you, illegal immigrants commit more crimes than anyone else, because, first of all, they’re coming into this country — they’re committing a crime by coming into this country, so they don’t care about our laws. They don’t abide by our laws.

AMY GOODMAN: …Jean Guerrero, you’ve been shaking your head through this comment. Stacey Goodman is a retired police officer.

JEAN GUERRERO: Yeah, she mentioned blood on Biden’s hands. If you want to talk about somebody who has blood on their hands, the Republican Party has spent the last seven years normalizing the white supremacist “great replacement” theory, which has been used by white terrorists, by white extremists across the world and in this country to commit horrific acts of violence against Mexican Americans, against Latinos, against Black people, and it’s one of the most dangerous theories that exists today. And it has been normalized in U.S. politics. It’s the idea that immigrants are being brought to the United States to replace white people. It confuses demographic change and demographic growth with demographic subtraction and demographic violence. It’s extremely deceptive and manipulative, and the Republican Party has been doing this for seven years. And so, it’s, of course, no surprise that under the Trump administration we saw the worst, the most deadly attack against the Mexican American community that the United States has seen, in El Paso, when you saw the white supremacist shooter attack a Walmart because of this theory.

So, the notion that Trump is the victim, that he is being victimized, or that Americans are being victimized by the Democratic Party’s border policies, completely ignores the reality, which is that President Biden has deployed historic numbers of agents to the border. They’re seeing record seizures of fentanyl. He has kept in place a majority of Trump’s restrictive policies at the border. And again, the research consistently shows that immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes, and this includes undocumented immigrants. Undocumented immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes.

AMY GOODMAN: Jean Guerrero, before we go, I want to ask you about your latest piece in The New York Times, “How Biden Can Win Over Young Latinos.” You say that 20% of the Latino population that will be voting will be voting for the first time. What is the significance of this?

JEAN GUERRERO: So, the focus has been on the MAGA Latino. Every time you talk about the Latino vote in the national media, you hear about the MAGA Latino, the Latino who’s supporting Trump. And while this is a reality of a segment of the Latino voters, those who are going to determine the future of the Latino vote are young progressive voters, who are overrepresented, actually, in battleground states. So, if President Biden focuses on turning out this young Latino electorate, it can make all the difference.

And these are Latinos who are very, very progressive. They believe in a pathway to citizenship for long-term undocumented immigrants. They believe in abortion rights. They believe in stopping climate change. They believe in stopping gun violence. They’re more likely to belong to groups that have been harmed by Trump. They’re more likely to identify as LGBTQ. They’re more likely to have a family member or a close friend who is undocumented.

So, if President Biden wants to win over young Latinos, he needs to take the group of people that Trump has chosen to persecute systematically, and show that he has what it takes to defend them. He has already taken significant actions as far as executive action to provide deportation relief to the undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens. However, he needs to go farther than that. He needs to take much bolder action to show that he is in fact a fighter for oppressed communities.

Right now there is an impression among young voters, including Latino voters, that he is as bad with oppressed communities as Trump, because of the horrors in Gaza. And there is one way — there is just one way that President Biden can counter that narrative, and it is to take these people that Trump is victimizing, that the Republican Party is victimizing, and show that he has what it takes to defend them and take bold action to provide deportation relief to all undocumented people who have lived here a long time, who have U.S. citizen children here, who were essential workers during the pandemic, and make sure that they can be safe here, they can continue paying taxes, and they can continue to save this economy from a recession.

AMY GOODMAN: Jean Guerrero, we want to thank you for being with us, author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda. We’ll link to your piece in The New York Times, “How Biden Can Win Over Young Latinos.”

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