In a concession speech after losing the Democratic primary ahead of Texas’ Senate election later this year, state Sen. Roland Gutierrez called out former President Donald Trump for saying in a recent interview that migrants arriving to the United States speak languages “like from… Mars.”
“Donald Trump just yesterday, he says they speak some language from outer space,” Gutierrez recounted to a supportive crowd.. “It’s Spanish, ass****. It’s just Spanish.”
Trump described migrants as “coming from parts unknown, countries that you’ve never heard of — languages that nobody in this country speaks. You know, we don’t even have teachers of some of these languages. Who would think that? We have languages that are like from the planet Mars.” The absurdity — which spurred laughs from the crowd around Trump, though the ex-president himself wasn’t laughing — mirrored the extensive pattern of the far-right clamoring against migrants in extreme terms. Trump himself, for instance, has asserted the U.S. is staring down an extensive crime wave connected to such individuals, though the data supporting this idea isn’t actually out there.
And in some of his recent commentary following his infamous departure from Fox News, ex-host Tucker Carlson suggested that migrants couldn’t be trusted to actually advance the interests of the U.S., positing possibly extremely nefarious intentions in these people arriving to the country at all. Carlson was criticizing a proposal to allow some migrants to serve in the U.S. military and thereby access an expedited path to citizenship.
Beyond figures like Trump and Carlson, Republican politicians incessantly claim the U.S. has been facing an “invasion” at the southern border… though Republicans in Congress recently shot down a series of opportunities for bipartisan action on the border actually addressing that about which they’re supposedly so concerned!
Back in Texas, the Democrat facing incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in the state’s Senate election this November will now be Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas).
