Trump Calls for Border Agent Hiring Spree With New Pay Hikes

(Bloomberg) -- Republican nominee Donald Trump called for raises and bonuses for border agents in an attempt to recruit 10,000 new people to secure the US-Mexico border.

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Trump said Sunday that, if elected in November, he will call on Congress to pass a 10% pay increase for border patrol agents and approve $10,000 retention and signing bonuses.

“This will ensure that we can hire and keep the border patrol agents that we need to keep, and we can also bring in a lot of new ones, really great ones,” Trump said at a rally in Prescott Valley, Arizona, a town in a Republican-leaning county where Trump took 64% of the vote in the 2020 presidential race.

Trump’s bid to recruit thousands more border agents comes as he is sharpening his immigration pitch to court voters in swing state that President Joe Biden won by fewer than 11,000 votes four years ago. Polls show that voters consistently rank Trump higher on border security than his opponent Vice President Kamala Harris.

An additional 10,000 agents would represent a roughly 50% increase from the nearly 19,500 employed by the US Customs and Border Protection in fiscal year 2022. Immigration remains a top concern among the state’s voters. Trump has pledged to finish building a border wall and conduct mass deportations of undocumented migrants.

Arizona opened early voting on Oct. 9, kicking off the 2024 choice in a closely contested state that was central to Trump’s false claims of election tampering after the last election. Trump has a 1 percentage point lead in Arizona over Harris, his Democratic opponent, in the latest RealClearPolitics average of polls.

Harris, meanwhile, has assailed Trump for his role in killing a bipartisan immigration bill that would have addressed the border crisis, and has said she would sign it into law if it came to her desk. She has said she’d strengthen border security and boost prosecutions of repeat offenders while also providing legal pathways to citizenship for migrants already in the US.

Arizona Campaigning

Trump’s Arizona stop caps his latest tour of western states, which included an unusual trip to Coachella in heavily Democratic California and a roundtable in Las Vegas to meet Latino supporters, including Goya Foods Inc. Chief Executive Officer Robert Unanue.

Harris visited Arizona last week for a rally and a visit with Republicans who don’t support Trump. She pledged to create a bipartisan policy advice council if she’s elected, part of efforts to broaden the Democratic ticket’s appeal among independents and Republicans wary of the former president.

With Trump and Harris vying for Latino votes, Harris defended her record on immigration and health care at a Univision town hall on Oct. 10. Univision also is airing a town hall with Trump on Oct. 16.

Latinos have grown at the second-fastest rate of any major racial and ethnic group in the US electorate since the 2020 presidential election, according to a Pew Research Center survey, which also found an estimated 36.2 million are eligible to vote this year, up from 32.3 million in 2020.

A recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll concluded that Harris has the edge among likely Latino voters in Nevada and Arizona, though Trump led among Latino men under age 50.

Arizona’s number of eligible Latino voters has more than doubled since 2000 to an estimated 1.3 million, and they now make up a quarter of the state’s electorate. They also skew significantly younger than the average Arizona voter.

(Updates with Trump announcement of hiring plan, agent figures.)

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