Former President Donald Trump backed an idea for a “migrant league” similar to the Ultimate Fighting Championship in remarks to Christian conservatives at a Faith & Freedom Coalition conference on Saturday.
“Why don’t you set up a migrant league of fighters and have your regular league of fighters and then you have the champion of your league, these are the greatest fighters in the world, fight the champion of the migrants,” said Trump, who claimed he pitched the idea to UFC President and CEO Dana White.
He continued, “I think the migrant guy might win, that’s how tough they are.”
The presumptive Republican presidential candidate, who once compared asylum-seekers to UFC fighters in 2019, added that White didn’t like the concept “too much.”
“But actually, it’s not the worst idea I’ve ever had,” said Trump. “These are tough people, these people are tough and they’re nasty, mean.”
“It was a joke, it was a joke,” said White, a friend of the former president. “I saw everybody going crazy online. But yeah, he did say it.”
Trump would later bring up his “new migrant fight league” idea again at a rally in Philadelphia.
“You know, these are tough cookies coming into our country, coming with prisons and mental institutions,” he said.
He added that the idea could make White — who has appeared alongside him at multiple UFC events — “a lot of money.”
Sarafina Chitika, a spokesperson for Biden’s re-election campaign, took aim at the former president over his “incoherent, unhinged tirade” on Saturday.
“Fitting that convicted felon Donald Trump spent his time at a religious conference threatening to round up Latinos, bragging about ripping away Americans’ freedoms, and promising to be even more extreme if he regains power,” said Chitika in a statement.
The remarks from Trump arrive amid a campaign where he’s used dehumanizing rhetoric to refer to migrants, who he called “animals” and “not people” at an Ohio rally in March.
He’s pledged to conduct mass deportations of undocumented immigrants should he win in November’s presidential election and remarked that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” too.
Biden has talked of “Biden migrant crime” on the campaign trail, as well, despite studies that show immigrants don’t commit crime at a higher-rate than native-born citizens.