With less than two weeks until election day, GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance has begun attacking immigrant children in multiple swing states. At rallies this week in Arizona and Nevada, Donald Trump’s running mate said that children whose parents are undocumented are ruining the “quality of American education.”
Immigration has been a main focus of the Trump campaign; there have been promises of mass deportations of even people who are here in the U.S. legally, as well as vicious lies spread about Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, Ohio . Those rumors led to multiple bomb threats at local schools in the city.
At a rally in Peoria, Arizona, on Tuesday, Vance said there are thousands of children who don’t speak English in Arizona schools. “What does that do to the education of American children when their teachers aren’t teaching them, but they’re focused on kids who don’t have the legal right to be here?” he said .
There are 273,000 undocumented immigrants in Arizona and 15,000 of them are children enrolled in public schools, according to the Migration Policy Institute .