SCOTTSDALE, Arizona – Hundreds showed up for a rally in Scottsdale with Kari Lake and former acting ICE Director Tom Homan Wednesday evening. The event focused on the problems related to Arizona’s border with Mexico, the surge in illegal immigrants under the Biden administration, the increase in crime, including rapes and sexual assaults, and the fentanyl crisis.
Lake began her speech, “What happens on the border, doesn’t stay on the border. It goes to all 50 states. This isn’t Vegas.”
She blamed the Biden administration and noted that the left has been “working nonstop to destroy Trump for eight years now.”
As the former news anchorwoman typically does, she went after the mainstream media, labeling them “complete Marxists in media.” They are “trying to poison our minds and brainwash us.” She said, “It’s an attempt to make us hate the good guy,” Trump. She asked the crowd if they missed Trump’s mean tweets, and they roared “Yes!” Lake said she preferred them “over some bumbling guy who can’t even find the door to the White House.”
“I want to say this to the fake news media,” she said, “we don’t care about what you say about us, we care about saving lives.”
Lake added, “We’ve been lied to so much, not just by the fake media but by our government too.”
She explained, “I’m not for these wars they’re pushing to funnel money to the military-industrial complex.” She warned that Biden may start “World War III in Ukraine.” She said the way to stop that is to “stop the money.” Lake said in order to fix the problem, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy must sit down to negotiate. “Trump could end it in 24 hours,” she said.
Next, Lake addressed the fentanyl crisis. She said fentanyl is today’s WNDs — weapons of mass destruction. She accused the Democrats of wanting “to destroy our country.” She said that “they want this to happen” with “open borders.”
She said, “The hardest part on the campaign trail is meeting the parents of children who died from fentanyl.”
Lake introduced Clark Griffin and Karen Griffin, parents who lost their son Tyler Griffin to fentanyl. The couple said they’ve started Fraternities Fighting Fentanyl and the Tyler Griffin Foundation. Unfortunately, they said the public schools aren’t very receptive to their educational efforts since it “doesn’t fit their narrative.” The Griffins relayed that 300 people die a day from fentanyl in the U.S., and it is the number one cause of death for those aged 18 to 49.
The Griffins warned that many young people think they are being given Adderall or Xanax, but are being given fentanyl. Unlike alcohol, “You don’t wake up with a hangover — you don’t wake up,” Clark Griffin said.
Lake took a shot at Representative Ruben Gallego (D-AZ-03), who she may end up running against for U.S. Senate if she enters the race. She called him a “Marxist lunatic” who has said that efforts to secure the border are “cruel and extreme.” In contrast, Lake said it’s “compassionate to shut the border down.”
She said not just for Americans but for the migrants who become “indentured servants.”
Lake addressed January 6, pointing out that it was a “fedsurrection,” not an insurrection, since “feds dressed up as MAGA and instigated that crap,” resulting in “good people rotting in prison.” She contrasted it to the migrants illegally crossing the border, who get “free rides” to places like Martha’s Vineyard, a “vacation in Cape Cod.” She warned that Biden wants to give them citizenship, adding, “Over my dead body!”
Lake emphasized that there is “a war between the uniparty and America First.” She said RINOs advise her not to discuss election fraud, but “you don’t stick your head in the sand.” She announced that her attorneys had just filed their appeal of the trial court judge’s second decision throwing out her case, and said she heard that the U.S. Supreme Court is interested in her case. “The people who did wrong things are running our elections,” she stated, “we are taking every legal avenue we can.”
The crowd began chanting, “Kari won! Kari won!” Lake responded, “We know the truth, and Trump won too,” which prompted loud cheering. A large flag was lifted above the crowd and held waving over their heads, as Lake said, “If the fake news sees this flag, they might shrivel up and die.”
When she gets into office, Lake said she will “finish the entire wall from California to New Mexico.” She said she doesn’t believe the numbers issued about how many are crossing the border, “it’s much higher.” Lake said buses need to be filled up with migrants and sent back over the border, “and throw Biden and Harris in too while you’re at it.”
Lake concluded by recommending people pre-order her new book that is about to be released, Unafraid: Just Getting Started.
During his talk, Homan pointed out that even Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama made efforts to secure the border, Joe Biden is the “first to unsecure the border.” Under Obama, there were detention centers set up along the border, he said, and illegal immigrants were sent back over the border. Under Biden, he said 1,700 migrants have died on the U.S. side of the border, a record.
“This is about public safety, public health, and national security,” he said.
Homan said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas needs to be impeached for neglecting the border and said he’d just been asked to testify during a forthcoming impeachment hearing. The crowd roared with cheers and applause.
Homan said Mayorkas and other Democrats refer to their approach of allowing illegal immigration as “humanitarian,” but “the only humanity on the border is the men and women in green.”
Homan condemned the mainstream media’s coverage of action taken at the border to stop the illegal immigrants.
He said, “The media said they whipped black people falsely,” referring to reports based on a viral video that Border Patrol agents rode horses and lashed whips at Haitians illegally crossing the border.
“The only people that did anything wrong were the Haitians,” he said, for crossing the border.
He called Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY-14), who took a photo op kneeling as if praying next to the border for migrants, the “dumbest member of Congress.”
Homan said, unlike him, the people who disagree “have never looked into a 9-year-old girl’s eyes after being raped by the cartels, and her soul is gone.”
He pointed out that there are many migrant women and children who have been sexually assaulted and raped under the Biden administration who would not have been under the Trump administration.
“While we’re here talking, children are being sexually abused on the border, there’s a woman being raped — several … while we’re talking, someone is dying,” he said.
Homan told a story of a 20-month-old baby girl who was sodomized by the cartels, thrown into a river, and eventually died. He declared, “Trump’s policies save lives.”
He said 90 percent of migrants who apply for asylum do not receive it because they were not eligible. Consequently, he said only 3 to 6 percent of them who don’t receive asylum leave the country.
Regarding fentanyl, Homan said 100,000 people died in the U.S. last year from the drug. He said it is the “biggest national security failure since 9/11.”
Two “Angel moms” spoke about illegal immigrants convicted of crimes that caused the death of their sons. Mary Ann Mendoza said her police officer son Brandon Mendoza was killed by a “repeat illegal criminal” driving the wrong way drunk at 104 mph in a 35 mph zone. She said she will run for state representative in Legislative District 9 in Mesa in 2024. She said the situation caused by the lax border situation is “100 times worse” now than when her son was killed nine years ago.
Sabina Durden-Coulter, whose police officer son Dominic Durden was killed by an illegal immigrant in 2012, said it was insulting when someone asked her whether the race of the person who killed her son mattered. She said she was from Germany, and it took her six years to obtain U.S. citizenship.
“Don’t call them immigrants,” she said. “I’m an immigrant. And that’s by the book.”
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Kari Lake at Rally” by KariLake.
