Trump Escalates Dehumanizing Rhetoric, Says He Thinks Some Migrants Are ‘Not People’ but ‘Animals’

Former president Donald Trump​ has been escalating his violent language against immigrants, often echoing Nazi rhetoric and dangerous, dehumanizing language.

In the latest example, at a rally in Ohio on March 16, the GOP candidate for the 2024 presidential elections went so far as to say he believes immigrants are not even "people," Rolling Stone reported. Trump said, “I don’t know if you call them people. In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion.” He went on to add, “But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say.”

“These are bad — these are animals,” he added. “And we have to stop it.”

During a roughly ninety-minute address, the business mogul claimed—without providing any supporting evidence—that foreign countries were releasing their jail populations at the southern border of the United States, describing an increasing number of crimes perpetrated by immigrants.

Trump also falsely claimed that other nations were bringing undesirables, including gang members, to the United States. While Trump seems to believe that migrants contribute to crime, many studies, including a recent analysis published in the journal Criminology, have indicated that higher numbers of undocumented immigrants are typically correlated with lower levels of violent crime in any given place, HuffPost reported.

Late last year, Rolling Stone was informed by two sources that Trump actually favors using strong language, particularly contentious phrases when discussing divisive issues like immigration. “He wants the media to choke on his words,” one of these sources says. “The [former] president said he’s going to keep doing it, he’s going to keep saying they’re poisoning the blood of the nation and destroying and killing the country … He says it’s a ‘great line.’”

Following the comparisons to Adolf Hitler, Trump has pledged in private to intensify his already harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric. The second source said that in recent days, Trump claimed he was being "too nice" about the "animals" and purported gang members who cross the southern border, whom he frequently accuses of bringing drugs, illnesses, and violent crime into the country. 

According to this source who spoke with Rolling Stone, Trump also stated that his campaign will release fresh, even "tougher" immigration policy plans in 2024 and that his fans should be looking out for them because they will be "very happy."

In an interview with Fox News' Howard Kurtz, less than 24 hours after making the "animals" comment, Trump not only justified but reiterated using Nazi language.  “Look, we can be nice about it — we can talk about, ‘Oh, I want to be politically correct’ — but we have people coming in from prisons and jails, long-term murderers… They’re all being released into our country. These are murderers, these are people at the highest level of crime, and then you have mental institutions and insane asylums… and then you have terrorists pouring in at a level we have never seen before.”