Donald Trump, who was found liable for sexual assault last year, boasted about calling undocumented immigrants rapists during his speech in Detroit on Thursday.
“We allowed them to come in and raid and rape our country,” Trump said of migrants during his appearance at the Detroit Economic Club. “That’s what they did. ‘Oh, he used the word rape.’ That’s right, I used the word rape. They raped our country.”
There is no evidence that immigrants, documented or undocumented, are raping people at a higher rate than Americans. Studies show that immigrants are significantly less likely to be charged with crimes than non-immigrants, and there is no correlation between the presence of undocumented immigrants and a rise in crime.
Despite that, Trump and Republicans have repeatedly pointed the finger at immigrants for an increase in every crime imaginable, from rape and fentanyl distribution to murder and gang violence.
His rape allegation goes back to the launch of his first campaign for the presidency when he declared that immigrants from Mexico were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
Trump has repeatedly promoted the rapist lie despite the fact that at least 26 women have publicly accused him of sexually abusing them. Last year, a jury found him liable for sexually assaulting advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room in the 1990s and ordered him to pay her $5 million in damages.
Though the jury did not find him liable on rape charges, the judge overseeing the case said it was still accurate to refer to Trump as a rapist.
“Based on all of the evidence at trial and the jury’s verdict as a whole, the jury’s finding that Mr. Trump ‘sexually abused’ Ms. Carroll implicitly determined that he forcibly penetrated her digitally ― in other words, that Mr. Trump did in fact ‘rape’ Ms. Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood in contacts outside of the New York Penal Law,” Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote when dismissing Trump’s demands for a new trial.