Why Trump’s alarmist message on immigration may be resonating beyond his base – PBS NewsHour

WASHINGTON (AP) The video shared by former PresidentDonald Trumpfeatures horror movie music and footage of migrants purportedly entering the U.S. from countries including Cameroon, Afghanistan and China. Shots of men with tattoos and videos of violent crime are set against close-ups of people waving and wrapping themselves in American flags.

Theyre coming by the thousands, Trump says in the video, posted on his social media site. We will secure our borders. And we will restore sovereignty.

In his speeches and online posts, Trump has ramped up anti-immigrant rhetoric as he seeks the White House a third time, casting migrants as dangerous criminals poisoning the blood of America. Hitting the nations deepest fault lines of race and national identity, his messagingoften relies on falsehoods about migration. But it resonates with many of his core supporters going back a decade, to when build the wall chants began to ring out at his rallies.

WATCH: Trump under fire again for violent language and dehumanizing anti-immigrant rhetoric

President Joe Biden and his allies discuss the border very differently. The Democrat portrays the situation as a policy dispute that Congress can fix and hits Republicans in Washington for backing away from aborder security dealafter facing criticism from Trump.

But in a potentially worrying sign for Biden, Trumps message appears to be resonating with key elements of the Democratic coalition that Biden will need to win over this November.

Roughly two-thirds of Americans now disapprove of how Biden is handling border security, including about 4 in 10 Democrats, 55 percent of Black adults and 73 percent of Hispanic adults, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in March.

Arecent Pew Research Center poll found that 45 percent of Americans described the situation as a crisis, while another 32 percent said it was a major problem.

Vetress Boyce, a Chicago-based racial justice activist, was among those who expressed frustration with Bidens immigration policies and the citys approach as it tries to shelter newly arriving migrants. She argued Democrats should be focusing on economic investment in Black communities, not newcomers.

Theyre sending us people who are starving, the same way Blacks are starving in this country. Theyre sending us people who want to escape the conditions and come here for a better lifestyle when the ones here are suffering and have been suffering for over 100 years, Boyce said. That recipe is a mixture for disaster. Its a disaster just waiting to happen.

WATCH: Tamara Keith and Amy Walter on the response to Trumps escalating violent rhetoric

Gracie Martinez is a 52-year-old Hispanic small business owner from Eagle Pass, Texas, the border town that Trump visited in February when he and Biden made same-daytrips to the state. Martinez said she once voted for former President Barack Obama and is still a Democrat, but now backs Trump mainly because of the border.

Its horrible, she said. Its tons and tons of people and theyre giving them medical and money, phones, she said, complaining those who went through the legal immigration system are treated worse.

Priscilla Hesles, 55, a teacher who lives in Eagle Pass, Texas, described the current situation as almost an overtaking that had changed the town.

We dont know where theyre hiding. We dont know where theyve infiltrated into and where are they going to come out of, said Hesles, who said she used to take an evening walk to a local church, but stopped after she was shaken by an encounter with a group of men she alleged were migrants.

Immigration will almost certainly be one of the central issues in Novembers election, with both sides spending the next six months trying to paint the other as wrong on border security.

The presidents reelection campaign recently launched a $30 million ad campaign targeting Latino audiences in key swing states that includes a digital ad in English and Spanish highlighting Trumps past description of Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists.

WATCH: How media organizations are facing the task of covering Trumps anti-democratic rhetoric

The White House has also mulled a series of executive actions that could drastically tighten immigration restrictions, effectively going around Congress after it failed to pass the bipartisan deal Biden endorsed.

Trump is a fraud who is only out for himself, said Biden campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz. We will make sure voters know that this November.

Trump will campaign Tuesday in Wisconsin and Michigan this week, where he is expected to again tear into Biden on immigration. His campaign said his event in the western Michigan city of Grand Rapids will focus on what it alleged was Bidens Border Bloodbath.

The former president calls recentrecord-high arrestsfor southwest border crossings an invasion orchestrated by Democrats to transform Americas very makeup. Trump accuses Biden of purposely allowing criminals and potential terrorists to enter the country unchecked,going so far as to claim the president isengaged in a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America.

He also casts migrants many of them women and children escaping poverty and violence as poisoning the blood of America with drugs and disease and claimed some are not people. Experts who study extremism warn against using dehumanizing language in describing migrants.

There is no evidence that foreign governments are emptying their jails or mental asylums as Trump says. And while conservative news coverage has been dominated by severalhigh-profile and heinous crimes allegedly committed by people in the country illegally,the latest FBI statistics show overall violent crime in the U.S.dropped again last year, continuing a downward trend after a pandemic-era spike.

AP-NORC POLL: More Americans are worried about legal immigration than they were a few years ago

Studies have also foundthat people living in the country illegally are far less likely than native-born Americans to have been arrested for violent, drug and property crimes.

Certainly the last several months have demonstrated a clear shift in political support, said Krish OMara Vignarajah, president and CEO of the immigrant resettlement group Global Refuge and a former Obama administration and State Department official.

I think that relates to the rhetoric of the past several years, she said, and just this dynamic of being outmatched by a loud, extreme of xenophobic rhetoric that hasnt been countered with reality and the facts on the ground.

Part of what has made the border such a salient issue is that its impact is being felt far from the border.

Trump allies, most notably Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, have used state-funded buses to send more than 100,000 migrants to Democratic-led cities like New York, Denver and Chicago, where Democrats will hold this summers convention. While the program was initially dismissed as a publicity stunt, the influx has strained city budgets and left local leaders scrambling to provide emergency housing and medical care for new groups of migrants.

Local news coverage, meanwhile, has often been negative. Viewers have seen migrants blamed for everything from a string of gang-related New Jersey robberies to burglary rings targeting retail stores in suburban Philadelphia to measles cases in parts of Arizona and Illinois.

Abbott has deployed the Texas National Guard to the border, placed concertina wire along parts of the Rio Grande in defiance of U.S. Supreme Court orders, and has argued his state should be able to enforce its own immigration laws.

WATCH: Tamara Keith and Amy Walter on Biden vs. Trump on immigration

Some far-right internet sites have begun pointing to Abbotts actions as the first salvo in a coming civil war. And Russia has also helpedspread and amplifymisleading and incendiary content about U.S. immigration and border security as part of its broader efforts to polarize Americans. A recent analysis by the firm Logically, which tracks Russian disinformation, found online influencers and social media accounts linked to the Kremlin have seized on the idea of a new civil war and efforts by states like Texas to secede from the union.

Amy Cooter, who directs research at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, worries the current wave of civil war talk will only increase as the election nears. So far, it has generally been limited to far-right message boards. But immigration is enough of a concern generally that its political potency is intensified, Cooter said.

Non-extremist Americans are worried about this, too, she said. Its about culture and perceptions about who is an American.

In the meantime, there are people like Rudy Menchaca, an Eagle Pass bar owner who also works for a company that imports Corona beer from Mexico and blamed the problems at the border for hurting business.

Menchaca is the kind of Hispanic voter Biden is counting on to back his reelection bid. The 27-year-old said he was never a fan of Trumps rhetoric and how he portrayed Hispanics and Mexicans. Were not all like that, he said.

But he also said he was warming to the idea of backing the former president because of the reality on the ground.

I need those soldiers to be around if I have my business, Menchaca said of Texas forces dispatched to the border. The bad ones that come in could break in.

Weissert reported from Washington. Associated Press writers David Klepper in Washington and Matt Brown in Chicago contributed to this report.

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Why Trump's alarmist message on immigration may be resonating beyond his base - PBS NewsHour