Trump's border wall threat encourages migration to US
The anti-immigration rhetoric of Donald Trump, the leading US Republican presidential candidate, may be encouraging – not dissuading – Central American migrants to travel to the US to escape poverty and violence.
After learning of Trump’s plan to build a wall along the US-Mexico border, many Hispanic migrants decided it was now or maybe never, the Guardian newspaper reported on Tuesday.
"We heard he wants to build those walls. That’s why we came,” said Catalina Maldonado, who wanted to flee El Salvador for the US to protect her son from danger.
“A lot of people are talking about it in El Salvador. They say really bad things about him [Trump],” the 34-year-old told the Guardian through a translator in a homeless immigration shelter in Texas’s Rio Grande valley.
After three nights in a detention facility, Maldonado and her son were released to join up with her brother in Virginia and await an interview with immigration officials.
A tracking device had been strapped to her left ankle on the day of her release, she said, and she was told she could not leave Virginia.
Neldis Díaz came with his seven-year-old son, Nelvis, leaving his wife and toddler in Guatemala. He was also heading for Virginia, to link up with his brother-in-law. Trump’s message had reached the small settlement where Díaz grew coffee.
“I’m not in agreement with what he’s saying,” Díaz said via a translator. “I thought about it a lot – that’s what a lot of people are saying, that as soon as he enters [the White House] they’re going to change everything … I got here as fast as I could because I was afraid of that.”
The billionaire businessman from New York has propelled himself as the Republican frontrunner by framing himself as an anti-establishment outsider.
However, his campaign has been defined by controversy from the beginning, including disparaging remarks about women, Mexican immigrants and Muslims.
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