Former President Trump’s supporters have set their sights on former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley after her remarks on immigration issues at the U.S. southern border.
“Drug traffickers. Rapists. Poisoning our country,” the narrator says in the new ad from Make America Great Again Inc., a political action committee that supports Trump. “But Nikki Haley refused to call illegals ‘criminals.'”
Haley, during a 2015 event in Colorado, said it was “disrespectful” to describe immigrants crossing the border as “criminals.”
Haley, who is a U.S.-born citizen of immigrant parents from India, described the influx of immigrants coming into the country illegally as “incredibly frustrating” given the U.S. is a “country of laws.”
“Having said that,” she continued, “we are a country of immigrants. I am the proud daughter of Indian parents who reminded us every day how blessed we are to live in this country. They resent when people come here illegally. But let’s keep in mind, these people who are wanting to come here, they’re wanting to come for a better life, too. They have kids, too. They have a heart, too, so we don’t need to be disrespectful. We don’t need to talk about them as criminals, they’re not. They’re families that want a better life and they’re desperate to get here.”
The ad accuses Trump’s former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations of opposing a border wall the former president advocated for but was never completed and never funded by Mexico, despite a Trump campaign pledge in 2016.
The pro-Trump ad ends with the line, “Nikki Haley. Too weak — too liberal — to fix the border.”
Haley’s campaign called the ad “a master class in shameless lying, or, ‘Fake News.'”
“When Donald Trump was still a Hillary Clinton-supporting liberal, Nikki Haley passed one of the toughest anti-illegal immigration laws in the country,” Haley communications director Nachama Soloveichik said in an email. “This is clearly a two-person race between Trump’s debunked lies and Nikki’s vision for a strong and proud America.”
SFA Fund Inc., a super PAC backing Haley’s campaign, has defended Haley on immigration issues.
“This is not a Republican or Democrat issue, this is a National Security crisis,” the group writes on its website.
Haley also has used recent GOP debates, in which Trump has not participated, to proclaim a hard-line position on the border.
The Iowa caucuses, in which Trump is ahead in all polls, will take place in a week. The Hill/Decision Desk HQ polling tracker in the state has Trump leading with nearly 52 percent of the GOP’s support in the state, while Haley and rival Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are tracking about 18 percentage points, apiece.
Updated: 1:25 p.m. ET