President Trump on Sunday night said that Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams will turn Georgia into a “giant sanctuary city” and take away citizens’ guns.
Trump, at a campaign event for Abrams’s Republican opponent Brian Kemp, said she would turn Georgia “into a giant sanctuary city for criminal aliens,” The Washington Post reported. He accused Democrats of allowing undocumented immigrants “to destroy our country, basically.”
{mosads}He later said electing Abrams would endanger the Second Amendment rights of Georgians.
“If Stacey Abrams gets in, your Second Amendment is gone,” Trump said, according to the Post. “Gone! Stacey and her friends will get rid of it.”
“You wouldn’t mind, somebody comes knocking in here, ‘Please, I’d like to have your guns turned over to the government,’ ” he added. ” ‘Turn over your guns, please give us all guns right now.’ “
Abrams’s immigration platform does not involve sanctuary cities and at a recent town hall she said that she is “not planning to confiscate and ban guns.” She does say she supports stricter gun control measures.
As Trump stumps for vulnerable Republican candidates across the country, he has ramped up the anti-immigration rhetoric in an effort to galvanize his base ahead of the midterms. He has repeatedly called Abrams “unqualified,” prompting Abrams to reply, “I am the most qualified candidate.”
“I am a business owner,” Abrams said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “I am a tax attorney who was trained at Yale Law School. I am a civic leader who helped register more than 200,000 Georgians.”
Polls show Abrams and Secretary of State Kemp in a statistical tie.
The RealClearPolitics average of polls shows Kemp with a thin 2.8-point lead.
Kemp’s campaign has been dogged by allegations of voter suppression as he has declined to resign from his position overseeing the state’s elections during the gubernatorial race.
The fight over voting rights intensified last month when The Associated Press reported that 53,000 voter registration applications are stalled in Georgia, 70 percent of which are from black applicants.
If she wins, Abrams would become the country’s first black female governor.