Hillary Clinton’s campaign used Donald Trump’s newly-announced trip to Mexico as an opportunity to highlight the many negative comments and policy proposals the GOP nominee has directed towards the United States’ southern neighbor during the 2016 race.
“From the first days of his campaign, Donald Trump has painted Mexicans as ‘rapists’ and criminals and has promised to deport 16 million people, including children and U.S. citizens,” Clinton Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri wrote in a statement sent out on Tuesday night, shortly after Trump announced that he would meet with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto on Wednesday.
“He has said we should force Mexico to pay for his giant border wall,” Palmieri continued. “He has said we should ban remittances to families in Mexico if Mexico doesn’t pay up. What ultimately matters is what Donald Trump says to voters in Arizona, not Mexico, and whether he remains committed to the splitting up of families and deportation of millions.”
Trump is due to meet with Peña Nieto before giving a highly-anticipated speech in Phoenix, Arizona, where he has promised to clarify his contradictory and inflammatory stances on immigration.
The real estate mogul kicked off his campaign in June 2015 with a speech decrying Mexicans as “criminals” and has spent the last fourteen months on the trail criticizing Mexican immigrants for taking American jobs and endangering the lives of U.S. citizens. He has flirted with using a “deportation force” to forcibly remove millions of undocumented immigrants from the country and insisted he will convince Mexico to pay for a “big, beautiful” wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
During a Tuesday rally in Washington state, Trump rallied the crowd with a line about how refugees and undocumented immigrants “take jobs from hardworking African-Americans and Hispanic citizens.”
