A digital ad featuring violent crimes and criticising Biden launched last week in seven battleground states as part of a push by the conservative group Building America’s Future.
The ad focuses on Rachel Morin – a mother of five raped and killed while jogging in August 2023 near her Maryland home – and her accused killer, an immigrant from El Salvador in the US illegally.
“Joe Biden’s open border, a nightmare for American women,” a woman’s voice says as the face of Morin’s accused killer is displayed next to Biden’s.
Trump’s approach echoes the oft-cited “Willie Horton” ad attacking Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential campaign, according to Susan Del Percio, a Republican strategist critical of Trump’s immigration rhetoric.
Horton was Black and critics said the ad – which effectively boosted Republican George H.W. Bush’s candidacy – sought to provoke race-based fear.
“Trump is saying, ‘We don’t like immigrants and now here’s another horrific reason not to like them. They will come after you and kill you,'” she said.
Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said Biden’s border policies had allowed dangerous criminals to enter the US and that Trump sought to support the families of victims.
“President Trump says their names, calls their mothers, and stands with their families, while Joe Biden continues to ignore their suffering and welcome in millions of dangerous criminal illegal immigrants,” Leavitt said in a statement.
Trump has used inflammatory language to describe immigrants in the US illegally, including that they are “poisoning the blood” of the country.
MIXED RECEPTION
The parents of some victims have welcomed Trump’s efforts to publicise the brutal killings while others say he is simply politicising the deaths of their loved ones.
In 2018, Trump publicised the case of Mollie Tibbetts after the 20-year-old University of Iowa student was killed by a Mexican immigrant in the US illegally, but Tibbetts’ father chastised Trump at the time for exploiting the tragedy for political gain.
Laura Calderwood, Tibbetts’ mother, told Reuters she believed her daughter’s murderer was a troubled person but that the killing had nothing to do with his immigration status.
“It was an anomaly,” said Calderwood, a Democrat who plans to vote for Biden. “There are lots of illegal immigrants here and they don’t go out and murder people.”
Michelle Root, whose daughter Sarah was killed in Nebraska in 2016 when her car was hit by a drunken driver in the US illegally, told Reuters that then President Barack Obama and Vice President Biden never responded when she wrote them at the time to raise awareness about the case.
, Donald Trump received a phone call from the mother of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray, who was kille){kind=link}