Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) on Tuesday blasted President Trump’s plan to deport “millions” of immigrants without legal status next week, with her campaign releasing a statement in both English and Spanish ripping the move.
“Let’s be clear: President Trump wants to rid our country of ethnic and racial groups he doesn’t like,” Harris’s campaign manager Juan Rodríguez said in the statement, with a Spanish-language version also released in an apparent push for support from Hispanic voters.
“History has shown us what happens when governments begin mass roundups based on ethnic background or national origin,” the statement added.
The Trump campaign pushed back on social media, with deputy communications director Matt Wolking blasting Harris’s statement and accusing Democrats of supporting “open borders.”
Trump on Monday tweeted that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will begin deporting “millions” of immigrants next week.{mosads}
Hispanics are expected to make up roughly 13 percent of eligible voters in the 2020, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center, making them the largest ethnic or racial minority group in the electorate.
Many GOP strategists had predicted that Trump’s rhetoric about immigration on the campaign trail would especially hurt him among Latino voters in 2016; however, he ended up winning 28 percent of the Hispanic vote that year based on exit polls, which compared favorably to 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s 27 percent.
–Updated at 2:54 p.m.