Former US President, Donald Trump visited Ohio on Saturday, where he barnstormed for businessman Bernie Moreno, a Republican seeking to win his state’s primary to run against Democrat Sherrod Brown for U.S. Senate.
During his rally in the Dayton suburb of Vandalia, Trump repeatedly mentioned illegal migrants surging across the border, violent migrant crime, and the death of University of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley.
“Not one more American life should be lost to migrant crime. We can’t have another Laken,” the 2024 Republican presumptive nominee said in his remarks, in which he also repeatedly blamed President Biden’s policies for allowing millions of migrants, including, “violent gang members and gangsters” into the U.S. “When I’m President of the United States, we will demand justice for Laken on day one. My administration will terminate every open border policy of the Biden administration.”
He added: “The fastest way to reverse every single Biden disaster is to very simply just put me back in office.”
Trump’s trip comes three days before Tuesday’s GOP Senate primary, when Moreno will face state Sen. Matt Dolan, and Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose.
On the Ohio Senate race, Trump called Moreno a “hero” and “a winner” and urged voters to elect him to replace the “radical left Democrat Sherrod Brown.”
“Ohio needs to defeat your horrendous radical left, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, who pretends he’s my best friend. He pretends he’s my best friend, then he goes radical left all the time,” Trump said before a large crowd. “If you listen to his commercials, he sounds like he’s running with Trump. He’s not. He’s not with me.”
“We’re going to fix it again,” Trump said of the border. “Among my very first actions will be to stop the invasion of our country and send Joe Biden’s illegal aliens back home.”
Trump also took issue with Biden apologizing last week for using the word “illegal” to describe Riley’s alleged killer during the State of the Union speech.
“They have a new term for people coming into our country,” the former president said of the Biden administration. “They call them ‘neighbors.’”
The line was an apparent reference to a recent White House handout that referred to illegal immigrants as “newcomers.”
“One week ago, I met with the family of a 22-year-old nursing student, Laken Riley, who was brutally murdered in Georgia last month while out on a morning run,” the former president said Saturday. “She was so badly beaten up, unrecognizable. Laken’s killer was set loose into the United States through Joe Biden’s program of releasing military-age males into our community after they’ve illegally crossed our southern border.”
He added: “Laken Riley would be alive today if Biden had not unleashed his savage attack on America. And that’s what he’s done. But instead of apologizing to Laken’s family, Joe Biden apologized to the killer for calling him illegal. He shouldn’t have done that.”
“We believe that Laken’s killer is an illegal alien criminal. He is an illegal monster. He should never have been in our country,” Trump said.
