Donald Trump is stirring controversy once again after suggesting undocumented immigrants carry a likelihood of committing heinous crimes based on genetic factors.
The former president and current Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential race appeared on the “Hugh Hewitt Show” to talk about the first anniversary of the Hamas-led attack on Israel that ignited a brutal and ongoing genocide in which more than 41,000 Palestinians have died.
Trump spoke on other foreign relations matters while mounting numerous insults against President Joe Biden and Trump’s current opponent, Kamala Harris. On the topic of immigration, he went after the vice president, stating that she wants to “feed people governmentally” and “go into a communist party type of a system.”
However, it’s his subsequent remarks about undocumented immigrants that have triggered accusations that the former president is, once again, dabbling in scientific racism.
“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, and they’re now happily living in the United States,” Trump said. “You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now. They left, they had 425,000 people come into our country that shouldn’t be here that are criminals. And you know one of the worst stats? 325,000 young children are missing.”
“Let me guess…the immigrants coming from Europe don’t have the ‘bad genes,” one X user wrote. “The KKK thought the same about black people during Jim Crow and beyond,” someone else added.
According to the National Human Genome Institute, scientific racism is a historical pattern of ideologies that misuse science to promote false scientific beliefs in which dominant racial and ethnic groups are perceived as superior.
Leading scientists in many industrialized nations in the 19th and early 20th centuries championed these ideologies, but by the mid-20th century, pseudo-scientific racist beliefs were widely disproven. Despite that, evidence shows that scientific racism persists in science and research.
These discredited set of beliefs was strongly perpetuated against Black Americans during the Jim Crow era when the eugenics movement became widely popular. Scientists would urge white Americans to marry and reproduce solely among their race, labeling the genes of ethnic minorities as “unfit” to improve future generations. Former President Teddy Roosevelt was one major proponent of eugenics in the early 20th century.
On Trump’s most recent remarks about immigrants, his campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told NBC News, “He was clearly talking about MURDERERS — not migrants.”
As for the 13,000 figure Trump used to underscore his point, he’s referring to the 13,000 immigrants convicted of homicide and are not detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. However, three ICE officials told NBC that data doesn’t include whether these individuals are incarcerated in state or local prisons. Other officials stated that this data goes back decades and that many of these individuals entered the U.S. before Biden’s presidential tenure, including when Trump was in office.
Trump’s strong rhetoric on immigration dates back to when he first ran for president. He once said that Mexico isn’t “sending their best” and suggested that many migrants crossing the border were “rapists” and “criminals.” He fiercely advocated for radical border policies that included building a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border.
At a Minnesota rally in 2020, he invoked race science again and told a predominantly white crowd, “You have good genes. You know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”
The racehorse theory was and still is widely embraced by white supremacists to perpetuate the racial purity and eugenics idea that whiteness is the pinnacle of genetics.
