DORAL, Fla. — Speaking directly to undecided Hispanic voters, former President Donald Trump on Wednesday railed against “criminal” immigrants and warned that migrants were taking American jobs as he fielded questions during a town hall event hosted by Univision in Doral.

Trump claimed — as he has previously, without offering evidence — that jails and asylums in Latin America, the Caribbean and across the globe are emptying out and their residents were coming to the U.S because of the Biden administration’s immigration policies.

He said that immigrants must be able to come into the United States, but insisted that they must do so legally, claiming that Hispanic voters in the U.S. were the ones most outraged by illegal immigration.

“The people who are most against it are the Hispanic people,” Trump said at the town hall, which will be broadcast later Wednesday. “They are totally against what’s happened.”

Despite his anti-immigrant rhetoric, Trump has seen his support among Latinos in Florida soar, with recent polls showing him on track to become the first Republican presidential candidate in 20 years to win the Sunshine State’s Hispanic electorate. The GOP candidate is pledging to launch a mass deportation of the over-10 million undocumented immigrants who live in the United States, should he return to the White House.

While Trump’s Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, has maintained stronger support among Latinos nationally, there are signs that Trump has managed to peel off some of those voters. A New York Times/Siena College poll released this week showed Harris’s support among Hispanics at 56% — nearly 10 percentage points below the 65% that President Joe Biden won in 2020, according to exit polls.

Trump boasted on Wednesday that his support among Latino voters had “broken” records.

“We’ve done really well with the Hispanic people, you know. No Republican has ever been like this,” Trump said.

He opened the forum by speaking about his track record on the economy, a key issue of concern among Hispanics, and mentioned his nearby golf resort as proof that his personal success benefited Latinos: “We have tremendous numbers of Hispanic people going there and working there.”

Some of the employees of his hotel — located in a city known as a destination for Venezuelan expats and exiles — are born Cuba, Venezuela and other countries that have been a large source of undocumented migration to the United States in recent years.

As he has sought to broaden his support among Hispanic voters, Trump has only leaned further into his anti-immigrant rhetoric in the closing weeks of his campaign.

Jose Saralegui, a Mexican-born engineer in his late 60s, pushed back on Trump’s false claims that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, are eating people’s pets and local wildlife, asking whether the former president “really” believes the repeatedly debunked story is true.

Trump responded that he was just saying what he had seen “reported” and insisted that those migrants posed an undue burden on the southwest Ohio town and didn’t belong there.

“You can’t just destroy our country. … And we can’t let that happen to our towns and our cities,” he said, calling the situation in Springfield “a disaster.”

The town hall in Doral with Trump followed a similar event last week in Las Vegas with Harris.

But while Harris sought to strike a balance in how she discussed immigration — saying that the immigration system is “broken” while also emphasizing the Biden administration’s efforts to address the issue — Trump embraced his base political instincts during his town hall appearance.

When Carlos Aguilera, a Havana-born public utilities manager, asked Trump whether he believed climate change was real, the former president called himself an “environmentalist” and spoke about his administration’s improvements of the Okeechobee dam and clean air and water policies. He concluded by casting doubt on the existence of global warming before pivoting to a warning about nuclear proliferation and a coming world war if Harris wins the White House November.

Asked about the country’s deep political divisions, Trump defended his baseless claim that the results of the 2020 presidential election were tainted by fraud — his oft-repeated lie that fueled a violent riot at the U.S. Capitol — and insisted falsely that the “vast majority” of Americans shared this belief. But he said that the country’s success would bring everyone together.

When Ramiro Gonzalez, a Cuban-origin man in the construction industry from Tampa, asked Trump to win back his vote by addressing several issues, including the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol, Trump said that his supporters had not come out for him but to protest a rigged election. He repeatedly said he had called on them to manifest themselves “peacefully and patriotically” and described what many view as one of the grimmest days for American democracy as a “day of love.”

One of the last questions that Trump took was from Yaritza Kuhn, a 39-year-old Puerto Rican homemaker who lives in North Carolina. She asked Trump if he agreed with his wife’s stance on reproductive rights. Melania Trump wrote in her recently published memoir that she was staunchly pro-choice.

Trump replied that he was anti-abortion in the same vein as the late-President Ronald Reagan and supported access to abortion in cases of rape, incest and a threat to the mother’s life. He also doubled down on his support for states deciding on access to abortion. In Florida, voters will decide next month on a proposed amendment that would codify abortion rights in the Constitution — an issue on which Trump says he will vote “no.” He emphasized that the Supreme Court’s ruling that overturned of Roe v. Wade, which regulated abortion at the federal level, had happened during his administration.

“Everybody wanted (Roe v. Wade) out. ... I was able to do that with the courage of six great Supreme Court justices who are brilliant and courageous,” he said.

Earlier in the day, less than two miles away from Univision’s Doral studios, Harris’ campaign staged a news conference at a Venezuelan restaurant focused on migrant children who were separated from their families during Trump’s time in the White House.

Among the speakers was U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, a Harris campaign co-chair who represents a border district in Texas. She argued that Latinos who don’t believe that Trump is talking about them when he attacks immigrants — a widespread sentiment reflected in recent polling — are sorely mistaken.

“For Latinos who think that when Donald Trump insults immigrants or when he talks about mass deportation … he’s talking about somebody else — Oh no, no, he’s talking about you,” Escobar said.

Outside Univision’s studios, a mobile billboard paid for by the Democratic National Committee circled the surrounding area — including the former president’s nearby Doral golf resort — that featured a small business owner from Venezuela warning in Spanish that a second Trump presidency would attack U.S. democracy the same way that leaders Nicolás Maduro and Hugo Chavez did in her homeland.

The DNC also put up billboards along the Palmetto Expressway linking Trump to Project 2025 and saying that his policies would eliminate healthcare, increase taxes and lead to dictatorship.

Some of the voters at Wednesday’s town hall asked Trump to give them a reason to vote for him. The Arizona engineer, told Trump that he typically voted Republican, but wasn’t sure which way he would go this time around.

“I hope you vote for a Republican,” Trump said.

______

©2024 Miami Herald. Visit miamiherald.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.