Former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump (AFP)
AURORA, United States – Donald Trump will push his anti-immigration message Friday in a Colorado town that he falsely claims has been overrun by criminal migrants, while Democrat Kamala Harris again targets voters in swing state Arizona.
The Republican will be in Aurora, scene of a viral video that has played on a loop in right-wing media showing armed Latinos rampaging through an apartment building.
The incident fueled sweeping, false narratives about the town in the Denver suburbs being terrorized by Latin American migrants — fueling Trump’s election message that the United States is overrun by what he calls “savages” and “animals.”
Meanwhile Harris will keep campaigning in the West, home to much of the US Latino population, in hopes of clinching Arizona — a state which President Joe Biden won in his defeat of Trump four years ago by a whisker.
She campaigned in Nevada and Arizona on Thursday and won support from popular former Democratic president Barack Obama at an event in Pennsylvania — the biggest of the seven likely toss-up states.
With less than four weeks to the November 5 election, polls continue to show a race too close to call. The latest Wall Street Journal poll Friday gave Harris slim leads in four of the seven swing states, but all the key contests are within the margin of error.
Trump’s closing argument is heavily focused on his racially charged message about migration.
While the US government has struggled for years to manage its southern border with Mexico, Trump has super-charged concerns by claiming an “invasion” is underway by migrants he says will rape and murder Americans.
Conspiracy theories
Aurora has been turned into a frequent target since emergence of the video of the armed men, coupled with a claim by the building’s corporate landlord that it couldn’t carry out repairs because of the presence of a Venezuelan gang.
“Getting them out will be a bloody story,” Trump said of Aurora at a rally last month.
“Not going to be easy, but we’ll do it,” he told a cheering crowd.
Aurora’s police department told AFP this week that it had only isolated reports of activity by the Venezuelan street gang called Tren de Aragua in the city. And the Republican mayor, Mike Coffman, said violence of the kind seen in the video is isolated and does “not apply to the city as a whole.”
However, Trump clearly believes his fearmongering is striking a chord.
He has similarly promoted the entirely fictious story that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating residents’ cats and dogs.
One of his top campaign promises is to target illegal immigrants in “the largest deportation in the history of our country.”
Andrew Koneschusky, a political communications expert and former press secretary to Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer, said he expects Friday’s visit to Aurora to be more of the same.
“For weeks, Trump has been peddling conspiracy theories about migrants in Aurora,” he told AFP.
“He’s attempting to transform the city into a national battleground on immigration.”
Immigration is a national issue in this year’s election, but it’s one felt particularly keenly in the so-called “sunbelt” states of the west.
Biden won Arizona in 2020 by a wafer-thin 10,500 votes, while Trump has been leading Harris there in recent opinion polls by less than 1.5 percentage points, according to a tally by fivethirtyeight.com
After he has finishes in Aurora on Friday, Trump is expected to head to the other swing state in the western US, with a rally in Reno, Nevada.
He’ll then be in Arizona on Sunday, after a detour to Democrat stronghold California, where he is expected to hold a rally in Coachella, a rural desert area east of Los Angeles.