(Bloomberg) -- Former President Donald Trump reiterated plans to use an immigration law from 1798 to target members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua for deportation at an event Friday in Aurora, Colorado.
“I’m announcing today upon taking office we will have an ‘Operation Aurora’ at the federal level to expedite the removal of these savage gangs,” Trump said.
Trump has made Aurora a centerpiece of his efforts to highlight the border and immigration after surveillance video showed heavily armed men in the town forcing their way into an apartment at a complex on the edge of the city.
The Republican nominee has pointed to the incident to make the unsubstantiated claim that Aurora has been overrun by Venezuelan gang members who are terrorizing local residents, even as officials there have sought to debunk those assertions.
The proposal amounts to fresh branding of a pledge Trump rolled out last year to use the Alien Enemies Act — part of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 — to target gang and cartel members. Trump emphasized that his effort would prioritize the federal deportation of migrants belonging to Tren de Aragua.
“We will send elite squads of ICE, Border Patrol, and federal law enforcement to hunt down, arrest and deport every last illegal alien gang member until there is not a single one left,” Trump said, referring to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “And if they come back into our country, they will be told it is an automatic 10-year sentence in jail with no possibility of parole.”
The former president also reiterated his call for the death penalty for “any migrant that kills an American citizen or a law enforcement officer.”
Trump’s conspiracy-laced depiction of Aurora echoes similar false claims he’s made about Springfield, Ohio, saying that Haitian migrants there entered the US illegally and have been eating their neighbors’ dogs and cats.
The former president is vowing to finish building the wall on the southwestern border, reinstate a ban on people from predominantly Muslim countries and carry out mass deportations of undocumented migrants if he is returned to the White House. He’s drawn criticism over his language, including for calling the border crisis an “invasion” and saying that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Trump has also sought to drag the fight over immigration into the response to two deadly hurricanes that have hit the US southeast, promoting unfounded claims that federal money for disaster relief was “stolen” to provide housing for undocumented migrants.
A September Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll showed Trump enjoys a 14-point advantage over Harris among likely voters on immigration.
Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman, a Republican, issued a statement ahead of Trump’s visit pushing back on the claims of rampant gang violence being committed by Venezuelan migrants, saying it was a “considerably safe city” and offering him a briefing with the town’s police chief.
“The reality is that the concerns about Venezuelan gang activity have been grossly exaggerated,” Coffman said in the statement. “The incidents were limited to several apartment complexes in this city of more than 400,000 residents.”
Officials in Springfield, which Trump has also said he plans to visit, have similarly debunked his claims about their town. Trump’s comments about Springfield sparked public safety concerns after the town received bomb threats to schools and hospitals.
Harris last month made her first visit to the US-Mexico border since becoming the Democratic party’s nominee — seeking to neutralize the issue. She vowed to take additional steps to prevent border crossings, to ramp up prosecutions of repeat offenders and to surge resources to halt the flow of fentanyl and precursor chemicals used to make the deadly drug.
The vice president has also hit Trump over his role in killing a bipartisan bill that would have provided more resources to address the border, laying the blame for the immigration crisis directly on her Republican opponent.
Republicans have seized on Harris’ portfolio early in the administration that included addressing the root causes of migration. Other officials, however, such as Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, bore more direct responsibility for the situation at the border.
Harris is walking a political tightrope on immigration, vowing to take tougher steps on the border that have rankled allies on her left such as Hispanic groups and immigrant-rights activists, even as she vows to push for a pathway to citizenship for migrants already in the country.
The Democratic nominee on Friday campaigned in Arizona, a border state, where shoring up her standing with Hispanic voters will be critical to her election hopes.
(Updates throughout with Trump remarks)
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