Thousands of people watched former president Donald Trump speak Thursday at an airport hangar in Albuquerque, a late visit to a state he is unlikely to win but where his supporters gave him a joyous welcome.
With polls showing New Mexico is unlikely to be in play in the presidential election, the former president urged the crowd to prove the predictions wrong. He hit familiar themes like the border and gas price inflation and enthusiastically praised Hispanic communities.
The rally was only announced on Sunday, and after a few days of scrambling over parking and location, Trump’s supporters had to park far away, get buses, walk and stand in long long lines. It didn’t bother many of them one bit.
“It’s great,” said Jose Hernandez, a small business owner from Albuquerque, who was buying a shirt from a stall selling MAGA hats in every color and gold sneakers.
“There’s a lot of people that are very happy that he’s here. We talked with a lot of people in line and stuff like that. So everybody’s excited.”
Like many people here today, he is a Hispanic New Mexican, a constituency that has traditionally voted Democrat. He switched parties, as did Thomas Hernandez, no relation as far as KUNM is aware, who was standing in line with a Trump flag and two Trump hats.
“I came from a Democratic family, and I was indoctrinated to vote Democrat,” he said. He credits the party with helping his parents work their way out of poverty. “I grew up as a Chicano person in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I saw the policies that the Democrats had when we were growing up.”
He thinks it is much harder for people to lift themselves up economically now. When asked what the biggest issue is in this election, like many others he said the border and specifically fentanyl smuggling.
“My daughter died of fentanyl,” he said. “And I’ve had multiple family friends that have had incidents of somebody in their family, having overdoses or being addicted to that fentanyl.”
And he blames the current administration.
“The border czar, comrade Kamala, she didn’t do anything for us down there.”
Inside the hangar, as the crowd waited for the main event, they heard from speakers including Myron Lizer, the former Vice President of the Navajo Nation, who struck a note of unity.
“There’s an Indian proverb out there. It says, the left wing and the right wing are of the same bird,” he said.
And the Republican candidate for the state’s most competitive congressional district, Yvette Herrell, spoke. The 2nd Congressional District in the south of the state is nearly 60% Hispanic and she is running against a Mexican-American Democrat, Gabe Vasquez. She touched on regular themes of hers: transgender athletes, border security and immigration.
“When you vote to allow men in girls sports, when you don’t stand up for the parents rights, when you call the wall disrespectful and a waste of money, when you allow to have illegals vote in our elections, not once, twice,” she said.
Noncitizens attempting to vote actually occurs extremely rarely, according to studies from the Brennan Center of Justice and investigations like an audit of voting rolls in Georgia this year.
As the former president arrived, touching down against a backdrop of the craggy Sandia mountains and a perfect blue sky, he told the crowd why he’d come, so close to the election.
“I’m here for one simple reason. I like you very much, and it’s good for my credentials with the Hispanic or Latino community,” he said.
He asked whether people in New Mexico preferred the term Latino or Hispanic, with big cheers for Hispanic.
“First of all, Hispanics love Trump,” he declared, saying they were “entrepreneurial”.
“But you have to turn out the record numbers that we need in order to really demand a better future. And you have to go out. You have to vote. We want to win, win, win.”
He almost acknowledged he is unlikely to win the state
“They all said: Don’t come. I said, why? You can’t win New Mexico. I said, Look, your votes are rigged. We can win New Mexico. We can win New Mexico.”
He made many false claims, including that he had won the state twice before. He did not and New Mexico’s 2022 election was ranked best in the nation by the Elections Performance Index at MIT.
A somber note came with a video of the mother of a 12 year old girl murdered earlier this year in Houston, allegedly by two undocumented men from Venezuela.
“Under Kamala, New Mexico has seen millions of people pour across your section of the southern border,” he said. Customs and Border Protection records about half a million encounters on New Mexico’s border since the beginning of Fiscal Year 2021.
Trump used familiar language — “tough hombres” — to describe immigrants and mentioned the number 13,099 as a number of murderers crossing the border during the last administration. The Department of Homeland Security has said that he is misrepresenting that figure and that it goes back decades.
He also mentioned immigrants flooding towns with deadly drugs, but the majority of people arrested smuggling fentanyl into the country are American citizens, according to reporting from KPBS in California.
Among several Hispanic and other people on the way out, his message had resonated. Lisa Parsons is from an old New Mexican family.
“It’s wonderful that he recognizes us and all cultures, not just one-sided culture, but many cultures, that’s what he’s reaching out to,” she said.
Amid long lines of traffic and closed roads, there were no big protests, but Joel Hernandez from the Party of Socialism and Liberation told KUNM he led about 40 people to demonstrate nearby. They chanted against deportations and against war, and said some Trump supporters yelled slurs at them, but there were no confrontations.
