Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg on Thursday claimed Americans who support President Donald Trump's immigration policies are supporting "racism."
Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., appeared at the third Democratic primary debate where he was asked about Trump's immigration policies.
"President Trump has called Mexican immigrants rapists and killers, tried to ban muslims from entering the country, and separate children from their parents," moderator Jorge Ramos said. "His supporters have chanted, 'build the wall' and 'send them back.' Do you think that people who support President Trump and his immigration policies are racist?"
"Anyone who supports this is supporting racism," Buttigieg said. "The only people who actually buy into this president's hateful rhetoric around immigrants are people who don't know any. We have an opportunity to build an American majority around immigration reform."
Last month, Buttigieg made a similar comment by claiming Trump voters will be "looking the other way on racism" if they cast a vote for him in 2020.
Buttigieg isn't the only Democratic presidential candidate who has claimed Trump's supporters are racist. Last month, former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke said it was "really hard" not to view supporters of Trump as racist.
"I think it's really hard after everything that we've seen from his time as a candidate in 2016 to his repeated warnings of invasions to his repeated calls to send them back," O'Rourke said. "Sending back people who are U.S. citizens, sending back people who were born in this country."
O'Rourke also chastised Trump's "description of white nationalists and klansmen and neo-Nazis as very fine people, his warnings of Muslims as being somehow inherently defective and attempting to ban them from entry into this country, and his transgender troop ban and his attack on anyone who does not look like or pray like or love like a majority of the country."