By Megan Lebowitz and Jake Traylor —
NBC News
Former President Donald Trump on Monday compared migrants to serial killer Hannibal Lecter — the fictional character central to the horror film
The Silence of the Lambs
— as he ramped up his anti-immigrant rhetoric, a pillar of his presidential campaign.
“They are harsh people, in many cases coming from jails, prisons, psychiatric institutions, asylums,” he said, referring to migrants who enter the country illegally.
“You know, asylums, like in
The Silence of the Lambs
. ”
“Hannibal Lecter, does anyone know Hannibal Lecter?” he added amid laughter from the audience during a long interview with the conservative media Right Side Broadcasting Network at his residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida.
“We don’t want them in this country.”
In the 1991 film, Hannibal Lecter is a serial killer and cannibal, who eats his victims.
Former President Donald Trump at his residence at Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida, on March 4, 2024. Rebecca Blackwell / AP
Trump has invoked the same film when speaking about immigrants on other occasions, including at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last month and in a speech in January in New Hampshire.
Trump further dehumanized immigrants on Monday by comparing their language to the Martian language.
“We don't even have teachers for some of these languages.
Who'd say?
“We have languages that are like from, like, the planet Mars?” Trump said.
“No one, no one knows how to speak it.”
[Is there a wave of migrant crimes as Trump says? The data does not support his accusation]
Trump also claimed without evidence that sports are no longer played in cities that have experienced the greatest influx of immigrants.
“We have children who no longer go to school.
They are being kicked out of the park.
There are no little leagues anymore, there are no sports, there is no life in New York and in many of these cities,” he stated.
New York, Chicago and Denver, among other cities, have received thousands of immigrants in the last year, as the number of border crossings has skyrocketed in recent months.
President Joe Biden visited the southern border last week on the same day as Trump, underscoring the growing importance of immigration in the 2024 elections.
The Biden campaign condemned Trump's comments about sports in their interview on Monday, posting a video on social media site X.
It is not the first time that the president's team has taken aim at Trump for his comments that immigrants are "poisoning the blood" of the country, noting that such language echoes that used by Adolf Hitler, who also spoke of a "poisoning of the blood” in his book
Mein Kampf
.