Former President Donald Trump compared migrants Monday to the character Hannibal Lecter in the film "The Silence of the Lambs" as he ramped up anti-immigrant rhetoric that has become a mainstay of his campaign remarks.
"They’re rough people, in many cases from jails, prisons, from mental institutions, insane asylums," he said of migrants who enter the country unlawfully. "You know, insane asylums, that’s 'Silence of the Lambs' stuff."
“Hannibal Lecter, anybody know Hannibal Lecter?" he added to audience laughter during a lengthy interview with Right Side Broadcasting Network at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. "We don’t want ’em in this country.”
In the 1991 movie, Hannibal Lecter is a serial killer and a cannibal.
Trump has invoked the film when he has talked about migrants before, including references at last month's Conservative Political Action Conference and in a speech in New Hampshire in January.
In Monday's interview, Trump further dehumanized migrants by comparing their languages to languages from Mars.
"We don’t even have teachers of some of these languages. Who would think that? We have languages that are, like, from, from the planet Mars?" Trump said. "Nobody, nobody knows how to, you know, speak it."
Trump also falsely claimed that there are no more sports in cities that have experienced influxes of migrants.
"We have children that are no longer going to school. They’re throwing them out of the park. There’s no more Little Leagues, there’s no more sports, there’s no more life in New York and so many of these cities," he said.
New York, Chicago and Denver and other cities have had thousands of migrant arrivals in the past year as the number of border crossings has surged in recent months. President Joe Biden last week visited the southern border on the same day Trump was there, underscoring the growing importance of immigration in the 2024 race.
The Biden campaign pounced on Trump's comments about sports in the interview Monday, posting a clip of the exchange on X. The campaign has previously gone after Trump over his remarks that migrants are "poisoning the blood of our country" by pointing out how the language echoes that of Adolf Hitler, who used the term "blood poisoning" in his manifesto, "Mein Kampf."
