Trump Speaks Spanish In Immigration Response

On Wednesday night at the final presidential debate of 2016, it was clear that the conversation would turn to immigration. What wasn't clear was that Donald Trump would make an awful attempt at speaking Spanish while defending his immigration proposals.

Moderator Chris Wallace posed a question on immigration to Trump and Hillary Clinton in an early segment of the debate. In Trump's response, he said that we have a lot of "bad hombres" that we need to remove from our country. For those who didn't take middle school Spanish, "hombres" means "men," so Trump was saying that we have bad men, presumably bad Mexican men, in our country, and that we need to implement his immigration policies to remove these terrible hombres.

Many politicians use Spanish as a way to connect with Latino voters. However, Trump's use of Spanish came in his justification for building a border wall between America and Mexico, and came off as condescending and insulting. It should also be noted that the way Trump pronounced the word, it sounded like "hambres" which translates to "hungries," so the insult didn't even land in the language of the people he was attempting to disparage.

Immigration reform has been a cornerstone of Trump's political platform since he entered the race. It was during his campaign announcement that he made his now infamous remarks regrading Mexican immigrants.

When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

His fervor for building a wall along America's southern border to prevent immigrants from entering the country set the tone for his campaign. At his rallies, his supporters can often be heard chanting "build the wall," in support of his trademark policy focus. And the xenophobic and decisive rhetoric only continued to build as he ascended to the top of the Republican ticket.

Trump's immigration plan includes the immediate deportation of as many as 6.5 million undocumented immigrants, and creating a "deportation task force" to handle the workload. He is steadfastly resistant to extending amnesty to any undocumented immigrants. This includes reversing President Obama's executive action that provided amnesty for children who were brought to America by non-citizen parents.

With his "bad hombres" comment, Trump proves his mastery of the Spanish language is as deft as his understanding of the people who speak it.