Trump Attacks Immigrants in Wild Rant at National Prayer Breakfast

After concluding that his administration needed a “softer touch” on immigration, President Donald Trump delivered remarks Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast that quickly devolved into a wildly racist tirade against immigrants.

“We have to get the bad ones out,” Trump said, claiming that immigrants were a threat to innocent churchgoers. “You can’t have people going to churches and coming out and have criminals taking advantage, and doing things that nobody even wants to describe.”

Trump claimed his immigration enforcement crackdown in Washington, D.C., had removed scores of “monsters” from the streets. “We took out over 2,000 hardcore criminals. You know, two percent of the population produces 90 percent of the violent crime,” he said.

In reality, federal data suggests that more than 80 percent of the immigrants arrested in response to Trump’s so-called “crime emergency” in Washington had no prior criminal records at all, which is part of a broader national trend of targeting law-abiding immigrants.

To illustrate his point, Trump claimed that he’d single-handedly saved the capital’s restaurant industry. “The restaurant would be robbed with people sitting there. ‘Hold up your hands, everybody! Give us your money!’ And then they’d whack people with the butt of a gun,” he said.

Trump also openly mocked Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey for urging Trump to abide by the U.S. Constitution in his lawless crackdown in Minnesota.

“‘This is the Constitution of the United States’—People don’t want to be mugged!” Trump cried. “They don’t want to have a murderer living next door that was, you know, killed three people in a certain country and is now living beautifully here. Because generally speaking, if they’ve killed in another country, they’re not gonna be the best of citizens.

“These are some of the meanest, most vicious people. They only gave us the worst,” Trump said, before turning to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who had once offered to take “homegrown” American citizens Trump wanted to deport.

“He’s sent us a few. I don’t want to talk to him about it,” Trump joked. “But he sends us some real bad ones.

“Isn’t it true that you will not send your good people to the United States? Wouldn’t you say? Look at him, he doesn’t know. He said, ‘What’s going on here?’ But no, he sends bad people to the United States,” Trump said.

Trump couched his criticism by saying that South American and Latin American leaders were “streetwise” in their supposed decisions about what citizens to keep and who to send away—which among other things, is definitely not how immigration works. “They cherish their good people, they only send us their bad people,” he said.

Trump’s fearmongering about immigrants is not only wildly racist—it’s also anti-Christian, going against the very Bible he hawks to his followers.

Leviticus 19:32-34 states, “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.”