Trump says migrants who committed murder 'brought a lot of bad genes to our country'

NEW YORK – Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump suggested Monday that migrants who are in the U.S. and have committed murder did so because “it's in their genes.” There are, he added, “a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

It is the latest example of Trump claiming that immigrants are changing the hereditary structure of the United States. Last year, he invoked language once used by Adolf Hitler to argue that immigrants entering the U.S. illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

Trump made the comments on Monday in a radio interview with conservative host Hugh Hewitt. He criticized his Democratic rival for the 2024 presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris, as he turned to immigration, citing statistics that include cases from his administration, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

“How about allowing people to come across an open border, 13,000 of whom were murderers? Many of them murdered far more than one person,” Trump said. “And they now live happily in the United States. You know, now a murderer – I believe this: it's in her genes. And we have experienced a lot of bad things.” Genes in our country. Then 425,000 people came to our country who weren't supposed to be here.

Trump's campaign team said his comments about genes were about murderers.

“He was clearly referring to murderers, not migrants. “It's pretty disgusting that the media is so quick to defend murderers, rapists and illegal criminals if it means writing a bad headline about President Trump,” Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign's national press secretary, said in a statement.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement last month provided Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales with immigration enforcement data on the people it monitors, including those not in ICE custody. This included 13,099 people found guilty of murder and 425,431 people convicted of felonies.

But these numbers span decades, including during the Trump administration. And those not in ICE custody could be arrested by state or local law enforcement, according to the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE.

The Harris campaign declined to comment.

Asked about Trump's “bad genes” comment during her briefing with reporters on Monday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said: “This type of language is hateful, it is disgusting, it is inappropriate, it has in our country no space.”

The Biden administration has tightened asylum restrictions on migrants, and Harris campaigned on a tougher stance on immigration to address a vulnerability.

The former president and Republican nominee has made illegal immigration a central plank of his 2024 campaign and vowed to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history if elected. He has a long history of comments vilifying immigrants, including calling them “animals” and “murderers” and saying they spread disease.

Last month, during his debate with Harris, Trump falsely claimed that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were kidnapping and eating pets.

As president, he questioned why the U.S. was accepting immigrants from Haiti and Africa instead of Norway and called on four members of Congress, all of them people of color and three of them born in the U.S., to “go back and help fix this completely broken and “to fix the crime-ridden problem.” Places from which they came.”

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Associated Press writer Will Weissert in Washington contributed to this report.