A new racially-charged ad released by President Donald Trump and the Republican Party on Wednesday featured a convicted cop-killer who was in the United States illegally. The man, Luis Bracamontes, was convicted in February and sentenced to death in April for the murder of two California deputies in October 2014.
The president’s new ad, which remained pinned to the top of his Twitter profile as of Thursday, claimed that “Democrats let him into the country,” and “Democrats let him stay.”
Trump further encouraged those who saw the video to “vote Republican now!” because it was “outrageous what the Democrats are doing to our country.”
But Bracamontes, in fact, returned to the country under the watch of Republican and Democratic administrations, and remained in America under both Republicans and Democrats.
After being deported by President Bill Clinton and again by President George W. Bush, Bracamontes reportedly returned to the U.S. illegally his final time under Bush where he remained until the 2014 shooting of the two sheriff’s deputies.
In addition, the president’s ad fails to mention that Bracamontes used an AR-15 assault rifle to murder the two police officers, a popular weapon of choice for mass shooters and one that Republicans, Trump included, do not support banning.
The man accused of murdering 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh last week, who critics say was inspired by the kind of racially-dividing rhetoric that the President and the GOP support in campaign advertisements like the one featuring Bracamontes, was also armed with an AR-15 rifle.
