During Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine claimed that “As a candidate, [Donald Trump] started his campaign where he called Mexicans rapists and criminals.”
In his June 16, 2015 speech announcing his run for the presidency, Donald Trump said the following:
When do we beat Mexico at the border? They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they’re killing us economically.
The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.
Thank you. It’s true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They’re sending us not the right people.
It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably— probably— from the Middle East. But we don’t know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don’t know what’s happening. And it’s got to stop and it’s got to stop fast.
Trump was referring to illegal aliens coming over the U.S.-Mexico border who commit additional crimes, such as rape. As Breitbart Texas has extensively documented, it’s common for human traffickers to “to sexually assault or rape the females” en route to the U.S., and the smugglers “usually remove an article of clothing from the female they rape and they tie it tightly to a tree—a rape tree.”
Furthermore, it is true that as the U.S. suffers from a massive heroin epidemic that killed over 47,000 people in 2014 alone, “nearly all” of the heroin consumed in the U.S. is smuggled in by Mexican traffickers, as the Washington Post found. Drug trafficking is an inherently violent operation.
UPDATE: Later in Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, while trying to attack Trump’s detailed immigration policy proposals, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine again claimed that Donald Trump and Mike Pence said “all Mexicans are bad.”
Fact Check: FALSE. These words have never been uttered by either the Republican presidential nominee or vice presidential nominee. Again, Trump specifically criticized the rampant criminal activities committed by illegal aliens coming across the U.S.-Mexico border, many of whom are Mexican nationals.