Trump Faced Tough Questions From Hispanic Voters But He Largely Dodged Them

   

Former President Donald J. Trump faced blunt questions in both English and Spanish from undecided Hispanic voters throughout the town hall.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

By Michael Gold and Jazmine Ulloa
Michael Gold reported from Doral,

The New York Times

 

Halfway through a town hall hosted by Univision on Wednesday, Ramiro Gonzalez stood in front of Donald J. Trump and told the former president that he had lost his support.

Mr. Gonzalez, 56, a self-described Republican, said he was alarmed when a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He did not like Mr. Trump’s leadership during the coronavirus pandemic, and he was dismayed by the chorus of former Trump administration officials who no longer support him. “I want to allow you to try to win back my vote,” Mr. Gonzalez, of Tampa, Fla., said.

Mr. Trump declined to take it.

Instead, he defended his actions on Jan. 6, offering a picture often at odds with reality. He insisted the crowds who came to Washington “didn’t come because of me, they came because of the election,” ignoring his own role in stoking election denialism. And he added: “Some of those people went down to the Capitol — I said, ‘peacefully and patriotically.’ Nothing done wrong. At all, nothing done wrong.”

Then, after criticizing the Biden administration and pivoting to the border, Mr. Trump addressed Mr. Gonzalez’s plea. “Maybe we’ll get your vote,” he said. “Sounds like maybe I won’t, but that’s OK, too.” 

Mr. Trump faced blunt, direct questions in both English and Spanish from undecided Hispanic voters throughout the town hall, which ran starting at 10 p.m. Eastern time. Men and women from across the country came to Univision’s Miami-area studio in Doral, Fla., and questioned the former president’s positions on climate change, gun control and abortion rights, and his baseless claims about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio.

The voters’ questions were polite yet pointed, and Mr. Trump kept his composure, avoiding the hostility he often exhibits when similarly questioned by the news media.

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However, Mr. Trump did not directly engage with many of the thoughtful questions from these voters. Skirting specific answers, he retreated to his standard campaign language, often talking up the achievements of his administration and making vague promises for the future. He would not say whether he believed climate change was a hoax, and he defended his role in overturning Roe v. Wade without staking out a position on abortion. 

 

In front of an audience of about 100 Latino voters, Mr. Trump did not once mention his pledge to undertake the largest deportation operation in American history.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Yet when Mr. Trump was asked about immigration, a central issue of his presidential campaign this year, he also remained vague about his policy plans. In front of an audience of about 100 Latino voters, he did not once mention his pledge to undertake the largest deportation operation in American history. 

At one point, Guadalupe Ramirez, 53, of Streamwood, Ill., asked Mr. Trump specifically to detail his plans for immigration reform, and to explain why he had helped tank a bipartisan bill that would have enacted far-reaching asylum restrictions and poured more federal dollars into training and personnel at the border.

“We like strong borders,” Mr. Trump said. Then, he blasted the crime rate in Chicago, criticized Democratic mayors and governors and talked about foreign policy without providing any specific details on immigration.

When asked by a voter from Arizona whether he really believed his debunked claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were eating people’s pets, Mr. Trump blamed what he had read. But he did not back down, saying: “I was just saying what was reported. That’s been reported, and eating other things, too, that they’re not supposed to be.” (He also insisted once more that he would visit the city, though no visit has been scheduled.)

Ms. Harris took part in her own Univision town hall last week in Las Vegas. Both events came as Democrats and Republicans have been working to court Hispanic voters, eyeing them as decisive swing voters in several key battleground states, most particularly in Arizona and Nevada. 

A recent New York Times/Siena College poll of Hispanic voters found that one-quarter of those surveyed said they were undecided or persuadable — a higher share than likely voters nationwide. Those undecided voters lean toward Ms. Harris. But polls have shown Mr. Trump gaining strength among Latino voters, attracting support that his party has not seen for decades.

  

The poll showed that Latino voters, as with most other demographic groups this year, are sharply split by gender: Hispanic men are far more likely than Hispanic women to back Mr. Trump.

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump leaned into his familiar appeals to Hispanic voters, boasting about the strength of the economy when he was in office and his efforts to create jobs. He also appeared to try to soften his approach toward legal immigration, despite recently ratcheting up his criticism of programs that allow millions of people to enter the country lawfully.

In one exchange, Jorge Velázquez, a California farmworker, described in Spanish working with his back hunched over, carefully picking strawberries with his hands, a tough job that he said was mainly done by undocumented people. He asked Mr. Trump who he believed would harvest the nation’s crops if he deported those workers and what price Americans would then have to pay for food.

Mr. Trump pivoted, as he often does, to disparaging newer migrants arriving at the border as “drug dealers” and “terrorists,” and claiming they were taking jobs from Black and Hispanic people who were in the United States legally. 

“We have to have people that are great people come into our country,” Mr. Trump said, “but we do want them in, and I want them in even more than you do, and we’re going to make it so that people can come into our country legally.” He did not explain how he might alter existing immigration policy to do so.

But Democrats have sought to underscore the aggressiveness of Mr. Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda. At a nearby news conference ahead of his appearance, the Harris campaign sought to draw attention to one of his administration’s most denounced actions — that of separating migrant families at the southern border.

A girl at the news conference named Adriana said she was 6 years old when she and her father were held in a freezing holding room without beds before being separated. A boy named Billy said he had been 9 when he was separated. He said the emptiness he felt when officers told him he “wasn’t going to be able to see my family again was something out of this world — and something that no kids should go through.”

Though he mentioned Ms. Harris’s name only twice, Mr. Trump remained critical of her, at one point arguing that Mr. Biden should have fired her. And as part of the event’s last question, Mr. Trump continued attacking her after he was asked to name “three virtues” that she possessed.

“She seems to have a nice way about her,” he said. “I mean, I like the way some of her statements, some of her — the way she behaves, in a certain way. But in another way, I think it’s very bad for our country, very bad for our country.”