'Taking pages from the Hitler Nazi playbook': Trump rhetoric alarms experts

Former President Donald Trump's recent comments that immigrants are "poisoning the blood" of the United States has drawn a fresh wave of condemnation from experts and activists, who are sounding the alarm that he is implying more and more violent solutions to satisfy his bigotry, The Washington Postreported on Thursday.

This new tone, which comes at a time when the U.S. is still struggling to manage a flow of migrants at the southern border, reflects "the ex-president’s effort to put the border and immigration at the forefront of his bid to return to the White House," wrote Marianne Levine and Meryl Kornfield. "His at-times escalating attacks have energized his base of supporters while prompting a growing wave of alarm from immigrant advocates, particularly as Trump is the clear polling leader in the race for the GOP nomination."

League of United Latin American Citizens president Domingo Garcia, whose group is the oldest Hispanic civil rights group in America, had a stark response: “He appears to be taking pages from the Hitler Nazi playbook and using them in this production to divide Americans and engage in tribalism. And he’s succeeding to a certain extent.”

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Other groups have echoed this line, noting that "poisoning the blood" is similar to Hitler's call to action against Jews in "Mein Kampf," telling Germans to "care for the purity of your own blood."

Trump originally made immigration one of his core issues when he ran for president in 2016, pledging to seal the border with a wall and force Mexico to compensate the U.S. government for it. In the end, he built only a partial wall, some of which was just upgrading existing barriers.

Republicans led by House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) are trying to force new restrictions on asylum seekers as a condition for preventing a government shutdown, but this proposal is contrary to existing law and would not be practical to implement even if they were legal.