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The niece of French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has established her own political party in an effort to bolster the nation’s expanding right-wing bloc.

In an interview with French newspaper Le Figaro on Monday, Marion Marechal, 34, announced the launch of Identite-Libertes (Identity-Freedoms) – or IDL – of which she is president.

She cited the right-wing alliance of parties, which came close to winning the French elections by placing first among the main three political alliances in the first round of voting on June 30 as the “I decided to launch a political movement to contribute to the victory of the national camp.”

A hamstrung National Assembly resulted from the central and leftist blocs joining forces to selectively withdraw candidates in a number of areas to prevent the right-wing from capturing a majority in the second round.

National Rally, the far-right party originally called National Front and founded by Marechal’s grandfather, Jean-Marie Le Pen, itself bagged more than 31 percent of the vote in the National Assembly elections at the end of June, becoming France’s largest party by vote share.

Marechal stated that IDL will work with Le Pen to support his presidential bid in the 2027 election despite being ideologically distinct from National Rally.

Marechal stated that “my goal is to work in a coalition with Marine Le Pen, Jordan Bardella, and Eric Ciotti.” Le Pen is currently the National Rally’s president, and Ciotti is its right-wing party’s leader in France.

Who is Marion Marechal?

Marion Jeanne Caroline Marechal is Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the National Front, which is now known as the National Rally, and Marion Jeanne Marechal’s granddaughter. Marechal married Italian politician Vincenzo Sofo in 2021 and the couple have one daughter, Clotilde. Marechal also has a daughter that was older than her 2016 divorce from Frenchman Matthieu Decosse.

Marechal was formerly a National Rally party member. When she was elected a member of the National Rally in 2012 at the age of 22, she became the youngest member of the French Assembly in history.

In 2017, she did not seek re-election, however, and also resigned as a regional councillor, before returning to politics in 2022 to join the ranks of Eric Zemmour’s far-right party, Reconquete.

In a break from her family, in 2018 Marechal announced she was changing her name from Marion Marechal-Le Pen, dropping the surname of her grandfather Jean-Marie, known for inflammatory views on immigration and the Holocaust. She now only uses Samuel, her adopted father, who has participated in the National Rally since he was a young child. He married Marechal’s mother, Yann Le Pen – sister of Marine.

In the June 2024 legislative election, Marechal headed Reconquete’s list for the European Parliament. She accused Zemmour of putting too many conditions on any potential alliance and preventing it by negotiating with the National Rally to create a single list of candidates for election.

Marechal was elected to the European Parliament on June 9, 2024 and joined the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, a centre-right political group within the parliament. Days later, Zemmour accused Marechal of “betrayal” and expelled her from the party on June 12. Marechal said she would serve as an independent.

What is the mission of her new party?

The name of the party – Identité-Libertés (Identity-Freedoms) – sums up its two main policy “pillars”. On the one hand, the party says it aims to defend French identity from immigration and what it calls “Islamisation” as well as to promote France’s Christian heritage. On the other, it seeks to protect freedom of expression and free enterprise.

Marechal predicted that the IDL would abandon the “mental socialism” that governs French fiscal policies.

It would also be “anti-woke”, the term “woke” coming from African-American vernacular to describe someone who is aware of social inequalities such as racial injustice, sexism and denial of LGBTQ rights.

Marechal promised to work with the right-wing bloc in 2022 as the country’s first female prime minister, drawing inspiration from other European success stories, particularly Italy, where Giorgia Meloni led a coalition of three right-wing parties.

Marechal claimed that Zemmour’s split came as he made Le Pen’s National Rally and Ciotti’s Republican Party her principal adversaries while she vowed to form a coalition that would strengthen the left-wing bloc.

“To remain coherent, I could not follow]his] decision”, she said.

The two Le Pen heirs have long been engaged in conflict, especially since Marine Le Pen expelled her father from the party in 2015 after he reiterated that the Holocaust was “a detail of history,” despite her proclamation that she supports her aunt. Marechal called the expulsion a “cruel betrayal”.

Marechal and Le Pen disagree over forming a stronger alliance between centrist parties and the right/far-right, which they both support.

Does the National Rally face a threat from IDL?

Le Pen and other party officials are currently facing charges of allegedly espionage European Union funds, and a new party was created. If found guilty, Le Pen and her co-defendants could face up to 10 years in prison and fines of up to 1 million euros ($1.1m) each.

Le Pen stated to reporters last month that she was confident that there would be proof that there had not been any wrongdoing when she arrived at the criminal tribunal in Paris.

The National Rally won’t be significantly harmed by the IDL, according to observers.

Posting on X, some of Zemmour’s supporters have predicted Marechal’s party will become a “satellite” of the National Rally. Some have warned about the possibility of a significant fragmentation in the right-wing camp if they continue to form a bloc.

According to Daniel Stockemer, a professor in the University of Ottawa’s department of political studies, the IDL would not be a viable political form.

“This attempt from Marion Marechal is more a sign of desperation”, Stockemer, whose research focuses on radical right-wing parties in Europe, said. She believed that starting a party on her own would be the only way to continue her political activism.

The Uzbek pop singer Nasiba Abdullaeva accidentally jumped on an Afghan radio station while driving from Tashkent to Samarkand after a performance in 1983 and was enthralled by a song that was playing.

“From its first notes, the song fascinated me, and I fell in love with it”, Abdullaeva recalled. In order for her to quickly memorize the lines, she requested the driver to pull over. “I didn’t have a pen and paper, so I just asked everyone to be silent”.

Aziz Ghaznawi’s original song, “I Lost My Dream,” was later adapted by Abdullaeva into a cover for the groove-heavy Aarezoo Gom Kardam (I Lost My Dream), which was wistfully sung in Dari. Released in 1984, it shot to popularity in Central Asia, the Caucasus – and even became a hit in Afghanistan.

Forty years later, that cover is the opening song on a new compilation released in August by Grammy-nominated Ostinato Records called Synthesizing the Silk Roads: Uzbek Disco, Tajik Folktronica, Uighur Rock, Tatar Jazz from 1980s Soviet Central Asia, which unearths an eclectic sonic era from the dusty crates of history.

The anaesthetizing drone of state-approved folk ballads frequently dominated the airwaves in the shadow of the Iron Curtain, which bounded the former Soviet Union and its communist allies from the West.

However, a vibrant musical underground was flourishing in regions where cultures had interacted for centuries during Soviet rule in the 1970s and 1980s. Artists from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and beyond were forging a sound unlike anything heard in the USSR.

Imagine Kraftwerk, a pioneer of German electronic music, traveling through the shadowy alleyways of the communist experiment in search of their lost in Samarkand bazaar. A postcard with neon lighting from a region where East and West collided, all while Soviet censors watched closely.

Synthesizing the Silk Roads is a potpourri of experimental fusion: the lush strings of the ballad Paidot Kardam (Found a Sweetheart) by Tajik singer Khurmo Shirinova, the Italo-disco-drenched Lola, Yashlik’s distorted Uighur rock salvo of Radost (Joy) and the melancholic twang of a bouzouki on Meyhane, influenced by Greek refugees who fled to Uzbekistan during the civil war in the 1940s.

The release serves as a correction for myths about the USSR and a time capsule of the region’s music, according to Vik Sohonie, the label’s boss.

If we’re talking about the European side, “the idea that the Soviet Union was this closed-off place that did not engage with the world might be true.” On the Asian side, it was a different story”, Sohonie said.

“This album provides a lot more insight into the Soviet Union’s cultural centers.”

All roads lead to Tashkent

Described as the “central nervous system” of the ancient world by historian Peter Frankopan, the Silk Road connected traders, mystics and empires from China to the Mediterranean.

These caravanserai-studded highways of inner Asia were probably the site of the first “world music” jam sessions, according to ethnomusicologist Theodore Levin, as musicians “adapted unfamiliar instruments to perform local music while simultaneously introducing non-native rhythmic patterns, scales, and performance techniques.”

When the Soviet Union was in charge of the latter half of the 20th century, those syncretic roads reopened like a cosmic fault line to produce an alchemical brew of 808 beats battling traditional lutes, funky bass lines mingling with Tatar flutes, and Uzbek vocalists belt out disco anthems.

Rewind to the 1940s to learn more about this cultural explosion. 16 million people were forcibly relocated from the front lines to the inner east as the Nazis stormed Europe. These transfers were made for a variety of reasons, including to safeguard military and economic assets, maintain internal security, exploit labor resources, and consolidate control over a vast multiethnic territory.

Echoing its cosmopolitan past, Uzbekistan’s doors were opened to Russians, Tajiks, Uighurs and Tatars displaced by Joseph Stalin’s transfer programme. On suspicion of being Japanese spies, about 172, 000 Koreans were previously deported from the Soviet Far East to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in 1937.

After the war in 1945, the Uzbek capital turned into a haven for scientists, artists, and – crucially – music engineers who would set up the Tashkent Gramplastinok vinyl record-pressing plant. A network of manufacturing facilities run by the state monopolist label Melodiya produced nearly 200 million records annually in the 1970s.

After the 1960s rock dens flourished, disco fever swept dance floors in the late 1970s with about 20, 000 public discos attracting 30 million visitors annually across the USSR.

Many clubs gained notoriety for trading “bourgeois extravagances” like Western cigarettes, vinyl and clothes, giving rise to an underground “disco mafia”. Uzbekistan’s Bukharan Jewish community was integral to the scene, leveraging their diasporic ties to import foreign records and cutting-edge Japanese Korg and American Moog synthesisers.

In Soviet Central Asia, boundaries were always shifting, and political suppression existed alongside glitzy discotheques.

The region’s progressive music was the result of Soviet policies intended to promote cultural diversity, according to Leora Eisenberg, a doctoral scholar at Harvard University studying cultural production in Soviet Central Asia. To cater to a multitude of ethnicities, the USSR institutionalised “acceptable forms of nationhood” into social and cultural forms.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev ushered in a “thaw” that encouraged cultural expression. Government-funded opera houses, theatres, ballets and music conservatories proliferated as “the state tried to Europeanise national culture while simultaneously promoting it”, Eisenberg explained. Through state-approved youth leagues known as Komsomols, which included disco spaces, were even permitted to operate.

Dubbed the “pearl of the Soviet East”, Tashkent’s historical and geographical importance made it essential to Moscow’s plans to modernise what it saw as a “backward” society into a communist success story. Tashkent hosted cultural festivals like the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association in 1958 and the biennial Tashkent Festival of African, Asian, and Latin American Film in 1968 as part of Soviet efforts to reach decolonized states.

By the 1950s, according to Eisenberg, “musicians from Uzbekistan were adopting the styles of foreign countries because of this political need to cater to the nonaligned world,” referring to nations that formed a neutral stance during the Cold War era.

Jazz that was previously outlawed now enjoyed state support. The inaugural Central Asian Jazz Festival was held in Tashkent in 1968, later moving to Ferghana, 314km (195 miles) southeast of the capital, in 1977. In Central Asia, this promoted a vibrant jazz scene in the 1970s and 1980s, led by Kazakh ensembles Boomerang and Medeo, and by Turkmen ensembles Gunesh and Firyuza, who fuses traditional sounds with jazz, rock, and electronic elements.

Then there was the folk-rock group Yalla, which Eisenberg called the “Uzbek Beatles”. Yalla, who is still active today, contributed significantly to the development of Central Asian music for a wider Soviet and international audience by blending Uzbek melodies with Western rock arrangements.

Waiting to be (re) discovered

These Soviet-era artefacts were mostly forgotten after the USSR’s dissolution in 1991 and Uzbekistan’s subsequent independence. Anvar Kalandarov, a record collector from the Uzbekistan, lamented the loss of the country’s cultural memory, lamenting “our people do not know this music today at all.” Much of this music has not yet been digitalized, and it is still stored in analog formats.

It was unsold vinyl pressed at Tashkent’s sole record plant combined with live TV recordings that comprised Ostinato’s compilation, sourced with the help of Kalandarov, whose label Maqom Soul co-compiled and curated the album.

After two decades spent scouring flea markets, garages, radio and private archives, Kalandarov amassed a sizable record collection that eventually caught the attention of Sohonie.

“It’s not a part of the world where there’s prolific music documentation”, Sohonie said. Since he had been considering a release in Central Asia since 2016, Sohonie jumped at the chance Kalandarov gave in last year. “Anvar contacted me, asking if I wanted to trade some records. I thought, ‘ Why don’t we do a compilation? ‘”

Sohonie and Kalandarov sifted through the thousands of records to choose the 15 songs that made it onto the recording at their meeting in Tashkent in October of last year. Although the licensing for all the tracks was initially difficult, the musicians’ surviving families were the ones who received the money.

Some of those musicians were making music because they risked their lives and safety.

Davron Gaipov, the frontman of the Uzbek band Original, was charged with organizing events for which prohibited substances were used and imprisoned in a Siberian labor camp for five years. The album features two electropop bangers, Sen Kaidan Bilasan (How Do You Know) and Bu Nima Bu (What’s This). Gaipov released two albums shortly after their 1983 release.

Others had darker fates, like Enver Mustafayev, founder of the Crimean jazz group Minarets of Nessef, whose track Instrumental simmers with sanguine horns. Mustafayev’s lyrics in Crimean Tatar, a then-criminalised language, and his political activism with a separatist movement earned him a seven-year prison sentence after a vicious KGB assault. Three days after his 1987 release, he was discovered dead from suspected tuberculosis.

Unfortunatly, Kalandarov was able to locate one of the Nessef band’s remaining minarets and turn up the tapes that had escaped the KGB’s possessions.

Musicians like Abdullaeva are fond of Soviet culture. “In my opinion, I feel the music from that time was a higher quality and more diverse. It had character. Everyone had their own sound”, she said.

That sentiment also spanned the time when artists were admired. We were treated with respect and were regarded as stars. Sadly, it is not the case today”.

Decentring the West

This rich sonic tapestry was buried by a sector too preoccupied with studying the rise of grunge in the 1990s or listening to some distant genre-bending recordings in Almaty or Dushanbe after the Soviet Union collapsed three decades ago.

In line with the decolonial spirit that underpins Ostinato’s earlier music anthologies that span the Horn of Africa, Haiti, and Cabo Verde, Sohonie said Synthesizing the Silk Roads is appropriate in Central Asia at a time when Chinese investment is poured into infrastructure projects and new Silk Roads are revived, like Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.

“It’s self-evident from the music that the centres of history are not what we are told”, he said. “If we are entering a post-Western world, it’s probably wise if we decentre the West in our pillars of imagination”.

Kalandarov hopes that highlighting Central Asian music will change how people perceive it. Uzbekistan is “opening up” to the world. We have a beautiful history and culture, and we want to share it with everyone”.

As Tashi Angmo rolls dough to make a type of Tibetan bread, the bubbling sound of boiling water and the aroma of spinach dal fill the air in her home in Chusul, Ladakh, India.

As she prepares the steaming machine, she says, “This is a dish that we call timok in Ladakh and tingmo across the border in Tibet.” “It’s a delicious meal after a hard day’s work”.

Angmo, 51, lives in Chushul, a village which sits at an altitude of 4, 350 metres (14, 270 feet) in India’s Ladakh, one of the highest regions in the world, known for its pristine rivers and lakes, high valleys and mountains and clear skies. Chushul also lies about 8 kilometres (5 miles) from India’s Line of Actual Control with China, the disputed, de facto border between the two countries.

When I realized that my family and I lived very close to the Chinese border, I was about 11 years old. Back then, we used to be a family of shepherds, and I often went near the border with my father, to take our sheep herding”, Angmo says.

She now works as a laborer for the Border Roads Organisation, an initiative of the Indian Defence Ministry to maintain roads along the Indian border, helping with construction and cooking meals for other workers.

We even traded the Chinese shepherds’ apricots and barley, which were grown in our village. In return, we brought back chicken, some Chinese cookies and also teapots”! She yells and points to the teapots in her kitchen cabinet.

Even after New Delhi provided shelter to the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan refugees, the delicate balance was not broken by the Sino-Indian conflict of 1962 over border and territorial disputes between the neighbours.

In the summer of 2020, there was a deadly conflict. Indian and Chinese soldiers battled with sticks, stones, and their bare hands along the Line of Actual Control in Ladakh’s Galwan valley as the world became entangled in the COVID-19 pandemic. Each side claimed that the other’s troops had crossed into their territory. Twenty Indian soldiers and at least four Chinese soldiers died as a result of the close-quarter fighting. This was the first fatality along the border in a long time.

Both sides have since increased border patrols, relocated troops, and occasionally engaged in standoffs.

The Indian military has now restricted grazing and farming close to the border in many Ladakhi villages. Only military boats are permitted to paddle in the pristine Pangong Tso lake, which has been claimed by both Beijing and New Delhi.

“We can no longer trade with Chinese people or go near the border.” She claims that the Indian military, who are the majority of the herds, has also lost land close to the border.

The border’s rich pastureland, which extends for 2 km in either direction, is now a no-go zone for the herders, which has largely been absorbed by military buffer zones on both sides.

Farmers and nomads leaving the country

Kunjan Dolma, who is in her late 30s, wears a pink scarf and a gray sweater and is a member of the Changpa tribe, a semi-nomadic Tibetans who reside on the Changtang plateau in eastern Ladakh. She spends the winter months in Chushul, but throughout the year she practices nomadic behavior.

Dolma claims to Al Jazeera that their animals depend heavily on the land close to the Chinese border for winter. The military stops us and advises us to find grazing lands elsewhere, but if we bring our sheep and goats close to the Chinese border. She says as she milks her sheep in an open-air shed surrounded by the low-lying mountains that we have lost significant pastures in recent years.

“In a way, the military restrictions also make sense. They guard us from Chinese soldiers, who I fear might euthanize our sheep if we cross border crossing points very close to the border.

Dolma and her husband, who are both teenagers, raise about 200 sheep to produce pashmina shawls from sheep. It is an important source of income, she explains.

In the warmer months of the year, she spends days in the mountains to ensure that their yaks and sheep have access to the best grazing areas. In the winter, the Changpa community relocates to the villages in Ladakh’s lower-lying hills. She makes a living selling yak meat and milk, as well as pashmina wool.

But Dolma’s daughter, like many young people from the nomadic families of the Changtang plateau, has begun turning to other professions to earn a living. Dolma added that young nomads are starting to reject this traditional way of life because of military restrictions on grazing land.

Dolma recalls her younger days when border tensions did not exist in their lands while sipping on a cup of warm water before heading to the mountains to make her cattle graze.

When there were no border restrictions, it was very simple for us to cross pastures with our cattle and we spent many joyous days there. She adds that she wishes her daughter could lead the same nomadic lifestyle and that nomads from China were very friendly as well.

Konchok Stanzin, 37, a councillor at the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council (LAHDC), a body overseeing Leh, the union territory’s capital, works with Chushul’s village leaders to ensure smooth operation of local government.

Stanzin acknowledged the issues nomads in Ladakh have been dealing with as a result of border tensions, speaking to Al Jazeera at the LAHDC headquarters.

The buffer zone, which is currently no-man’s land, includes grazing land. So, nomads face a challenging situation, trying to figure out where to take their yaks and sheep. Besides land, we also face difficulties in Pangong Tso where military border controls continue”, Stanzin explains. The Tibetan word for lake is Tso.

“]Young people] migrating out of their villages in search of work is a serious concern”, he noted. This is also causing nomadic customs like herding, which produce pashmina, to vanish. We are attempting to both improve the economic situation in border villages and educate the youth in order to carry on their traditions.

I can still recall the Chinese cookies.

As he enjoys a cup of Ladakhi staple butter tea in his mother Tashi Angmo’s kitchen, Tsering Stopgais, 25, notes that generating jobs is the biggest challenge for the region.

Along this border, there was once a free trade route between China and India. Many of us will have a huge economic opportunity if that reopens, he claims.

“My grandfather made a good living trading with China after crossing the border. My mother used to trade with the Chinese by traveling near the border. She would bring home some Chinese cookies, and I can still recall those.

Angmo chimes in, saying the border clashes are all political.

“Social media also contributes to spreading rumors about border tensions.” It is peaceful at the moment, not a war zone. On either side of the border, Angmo claims, there is a standoff between politicians and not those there.

India’s S. Jaishankar, the country’s minister of foreign affairs, addressed the situation in eastern Ladakh on the eve of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York in September, saying: “Both sides have troops who are deployed forward.”

At an event organised by the Asia Society Policy Institute, a think tank in New York, he continued: “Some of the (border) patrolling issues need to be resolved”, highlighting that this aspect would solve the dispute.

Former People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China’s retired senior officer Zhou Bo, an expert on China Forum policy and a senior fellow at Tsinghua University, told Al Jazeera that border patrols continue because “each side has its own perception about where the border lies.”

“So sometimes, for example, the Chinese patrolling troops patrol in areas which are considered by Indians as Indian territory. And likewise”, he says.

In accordance with local media reports, China has denied Beijing access to significant patrolling locations in eastern Ladakh, claiming that Beijing controls these areas. According to New Delhi, this has made it more difficult for the Indian army to carry out regular border security operations there.

Senior Colonel Bo claims that despite the difficulty of resolving the border issue, both militaries have negotiated agreements in the past to maintain peace, and that negotiations are ongoing to resolve the military and political unrest.

Education can bring peace, according to the saying.

Kunze Dolma, 71, who survived the Sino-India war in Chushul at the age of nine, says she believes education is what can bring about peace by counting the beads on her Buddhist mala and chanting a prayer.

“I just recall how frightened I was as a young girl during that war.” I thought the Chinese army would enter our school”, she tells Al Jazeera.

She tells Al Jazeera, “I now work as a cook in the village school. I hope the children are taught how to maintain peace along the border and how people on both sides of the border need to better understand one another.”

Tsringandhu, 26, teaches at the government middle school in Chushul. At this school, I teach children between the ages of three and ten. I impart the Tibetan language, Ladakhi Bhoti, to them. He told Al Jazeera, “I teach the students about the border in our village by explaining the history of this language to them and explaining that Tibet is now a part of China and is located across the border,” he said.

As part of an incendiary rally in Aurora, Colorado, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has called for the death penalty for migrants who murder American citizens or law enforcement personnel.

Trump, a former president, made numerous false and deceptive claims about immigrant immigrants in his Friday night speech, giving way to nativist sentiment as he seeks a second term.

“Now America is known all throughout the world as occupied America”, he told the rally, citing a supposed “invasion” of migrants.

Trump also laid out a stark vision for his first days in office, if re-elected, with policy proposals hinged on mass deportation.

“To everyone here in Colorado and all across our nation, I make this pledge and vow to you: November 5, 2024, will be liberation day in America”, he said, with a reference to election day.

In the weeks leading up to the election, Trump has repeatedly vowed to demonize migrants, citing a rise in southern border crossings led by Democratic President Joe Biden.

However, critics have compared Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric to the language used by white supremacist movements historically.

A town in the national spotlight

Trump’s campaign stop in Aurora was intended to stoke immigration fears because he has frequently used the area as an illustration of illegal immigration.

In recent months, misinformation has been spread about the city, with reports that Tren de Aragua, a gang from Venezuela, had taken control of some of the city.

Those claims were false. A property management company was accused of having decrepit conditions in its apartment buildings after a gang presence was blamed for the lack of repairs by media reports.

Despite receiving backlash from local officials, Trump and his supporters have nonetheless continued to spread the false rumors.

Ahead of Friday’s rally, Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman, a Republican, said in a statement on Facebook, “Concerns about Venezuelan gang activity have been grossly exaggerated”.

400, 000 people in the city of 400, 000 have been the victims of only a small number of Tren de Aragua gang-related incidents, he added.

According to Coffman, “Former President Trump’s visit to Aurora is an opportunity to show him and the country that this city is incredibly safe, not one run by Venezuelan gangs.”

Additionally, a number of studies have demonstrated that undocumented immigrants are significantly less likely than US-born citizens to be detained for felony and violent crimes.

Statistics from Aurora Police Department show that city-related offenses have decreased since last year.

a second term in perspective

Regardless, Trump repeated his false accusations on Friday, promising to “rescue” Aurora and other cities from an “invasion” of migrants.

According to Trump, “we will launch the largest deportation operation in American history.” “We will close the border. We will stop illegal immigration into our nation. We will defend our territory. We will not be conquered”.

Additionally, the Republican candidate made use of xenophobic and racist stereotypes, including that immigrants were likely to carry diseases.

“They’re very sick, very sick. They’re coming into our country. They’re very, very sick with highly contagious disease, and they’re let into our country to infect our country”, Trump said.

If he wins the November election, he made references to what he would do in his first days back in office.

Trump stated today that we will launch Operation Aurora at the federal level to help us stop these brutal gangs.

The Alien Enemies Act of 1798, an outdated law that allows the federal government to arrest and deport foreigners from a nation at war, was a part of the plan, he explained.

Trump then added that he would demand severe punishment for criminal immigrants.

To the cheers of the crowd, he declared, “I’m hereby calling for the death penalty for any migrant to kill an American citizen or law enforcement officer.”

Race enters final phase

With only 23 days until the election, Trump and his Democratic challenger, Vice President Kamala Harris, are in the final stages of the campaign.

Trump has long promoted anti-immigrant sentiment, even before his first successful run for office in 2016.

He spread fabricated facts about the Democratic Party’s secret Muslim leader and former president Barack Obama’s citizenship in the early and middle of 2010.

Trump campaigned in part against portrayals of Mexican immigrants as “rapists” when he announced his campaign for president in 2016. His term in office, which ended in 2021, continued with that rhetoric.

Experts have cautioned against using dehumanizing language to refer to immigrants and foreigners.

However, polls consistently place immigration among the most important US election issues, making it a popular topic for politicians to discuss.

Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance, have focused intensely on the issue as the November election approaches.

They have sought to paint Harris as a “border czar” — a false designation — who left the US with “open borders” vulnerable to mass immigration.

Southern border crossings increased under Biden, reaching 250, 000 crossings in the month of December 2023, but they have since decreased to levels comparable to those seen during Trump’s presidency.

Speaking to Latino voters during a Univision town hall on Thursday, Harris defended the Biden administration’s policy on immigration. She cited a recent bipartisan bill that would have tightened border restrictions.

The bill was reportedly scuttled by Republicans loyal to Trump, reportedly at the former president’s behest.

Critics claim that Harris has veered more to the right in regards to immigration issues. She made the promise to put more restrictions on asylum on hold than Biden, who has already acted to limit asylum claims, during a trip to Arizona last month.

Trump and Vance, meanwhile, have zeroed in on communities in cities like Aurora and Springfield, Ohio, to advance apocalyptic claims about immigration.