SHORTLY after arriving in the United States from Honduras, Jimmy Aguilera found work as a carpenter on the three towers that became the luxurious Trump International Beach Resort in Miami. Now his ultimate boss on that job wants to evict him from the country.
It took Aguilera, 37, who has been an illegal immigrant for 12 years, almost a month to get to America. He rode on buses, trains and even a horse before walking across the border between Mexico and Texas.
Every day Aguilera and others from Central America wait in their trucks outside the Home Depot store in Gulfport, Mississippi, to do work that, they say, white and black Americans are too lazy to undertake.
People such as Aguilera are now part of the fabric of US society, with children in schools, extended family ties and a tireless work ethic, but Donald Trump, the billionaire property developer turned firebrand Republican presidential frontrunner, is demanding that they be deported.
At a raucous rally 75 miles east along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico on Friday night, Trump told an overwhelmingly white crowd of nearly 20,000 supporters in Mobile, Alabama,that 11m illegals had to be rounded up and a wall built the length of the 2,000-mile border with Mexico.
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“The other day in California a woman, 66 years old, a veteran, was raped, sodomised, tortured and killed by an illegal immigrant,” Trump raged. “We have to do something.”
Victor Aureliano Martinez, 29, has been charged with the woman’s murder.
Back in Gulfport, Aguilera is appalled by Trump’s rhetoric. “I worked for him,” he said.
“He needed me and other Latino guys to build his big towers in Miami. But now he’s saying I’m a criminal, a murderer. It’s crazy and it’s dangerous.”
Aguilera has not seen his wife for 12 years. He hopes to raise the money to bring her to the United States, perhaps to have a child he believes might make it less likely that he would be deported.
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Trump has concentrated his fire on these “anchor babies”, calling for an end to “birthright citizenship”. This is enshrined in the 14th amendment to the US constitution — passed in 1868 for the benefit of freed slaves — which makes anyone born in the country a citizen.
Lionel Lopez, 42, from Guatemala, who was also outside the Home Depot waiting for work, said Trump’s demagoguery made him afraid. “Since he started flinging all this mud, some of the white people coming here have been turning their faces away from us and calling the police,” he said.
Without driving licences or legal documents, Aguilera, Lopez and others like them are liable to be arrested. “If the cops see us, they make us pay a cash fine on the spot — they pocket the money,” Lopez said. “The police see dollar signs when they spot a brown face. Trump made money out of us too. But maybe now they feel they’ve got enough.”
Lopez’s daughter and two sons had all been born in the United States. “I came here to be part of the American dream,” he said. “My children have never been to Guatemala. They are American kids.”
It was a very different America at the stadium in Mobile. Although numbers fell short of the 43,000 predicted, leaving banks of empty spaces, Trump supporters queued for hours for the best seats; the first had turned up at dawn.
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Then, as a voice announced over the loudspeakers, “Please focus your attention to the eastern sky”, Trump’s Boeing 757 twice roared over the stadium.
Trump told the crowd 7.5% of children born in the United States were sired by illegal immigrants and “anchor babies” were “the biggest magnet for illegal immigration”. He added: “We are the only place that’s stupid enough to do it.”
Alabama was one of five southern states carried by the segregationist George Wallace, its former governor, during the 1968 presidential election.
Trump earlier evoked Richard Nixon, who went on to win that year, by talking of the “silent majority”, a term used by Nixon to woo disaffected southern whites. “Send them home,” one man shouted repeatedly as Trump spoke.
Outside the stadium Olaf Childress, a neo-confederate activist who once buried a copy of the 14th amendment, gave out copies of his newspaper which featured stories about Jewish plots and “black-on-white crime”.
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Trump’s rapid rise in the Republican primary polls, which he now leads by an average of 11 percentage points, has prompted his rivals to ape his bumptious language and flirt with some of his more extreme ideas on immigration.
Scott Walker, the Wisconsin governor who once supported a path to citizenship being created for illegal immigrants, has backed Trump’s call for an end to birthright citizenship, as has Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana.
Even Jeb Bush, who speaks fluent Spanish and has a Mexican wife, last week tetchily defended his use of the term “anchor baby”, which a group he chaired said should be avoided because it alienated Hispanic voters.
Republican grandees fear Trump’s tirades could doom the party among Hispanics even if, as most expect, his candidacy burns out.
After calling for the “self-deportation” of illegal immigrants, Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee, secured only 27% of the Hispanic vote, compared with 44% by George W Bush in 2004.
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With a Republican- controlled Congress blocking legislation to give legal status to people such as Aguilera and Lopez, the party already faces an uphill task to improve on Romney’s showing. Unless it does, Hillary Clinton, the probable Democratic nominee, could be guaranteed the White House in 2016.
For Trump supporters, this seems to matter little because they view Clinton and Bush as much the same. “We’re angry Americans,” said Dawn Herndon, 53, carrying a sign stating “Vets 1st. No anchor baby”.
“Our troops are being neglected for immigrants who can’t even speak our language. Send them all back, I say.”
Allison Everett, 19, was one of five students from Auburn University with the letters T-R-U-M-P painted on their bodies (she was the U). Trump’s immigration policy was bold, she said: “America can’t be the good guy for ever.”