Anti-immigration advert, paid for by the Donald Trump for President campaign, was tweeted by the president last week

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Fox News, NBC and Facebook have pulled a Donald Trump campaign advert that has been widely condemned as racist.

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The 30 second anti-immigration advert, paid for by the Donald Trump for President campaign, was tweeted out by the president last week and aired during an NFL game on NBC on Sunday night and on Fox News.

CNN previously had declined to run the advert, which it described as “racist”. The ad appears to be an attempt to tie the caravan of migrants and refugees seeking asylum in the US to Luis Bracamontes, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who shot and killed two sheriff’s deputies in 2014.

Asked about organizations pulling his advert on Monday, Trump claimed: “I don’t know about it … we have a lot of ads … a lot of things are offensive.”

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“After further review we recognize the insensitive nature of the ad and have decided to cease airing it across our properties as soon as possible,” said an NBC spokesman, Joe Benarroch.

Fox News said it would also stop playing the ad.

“Upon further review, Fox News pulled the ad yesterday and it will not appear on either Fox News Channel or Fox Business Network,” Marianne Gambelli, Fox News’s president of advertisement sales, told CNN on Monday.

The advert features ominous-sounding music as a voice warns urgently about “the 7,000-migrant caravan” that it said was “marching toward our border”.

It adds: “Dangerous illegal criminals like cop-killer Luis Bracamontes don’t care about our laws”, before urging people to “vote Republican”. It ends with Donald Trump saying: “I approve this message.”

On Monday Facebook said it had blocked the advert from receiving “paid promotion”.

“This ad violates Facebook’s advertising policy against sensational content so we are rejecting it,” the company said in a statement. “While the video is allowed to be posted on Facebook, it cannot receive paid distribution.”

On Saturday, after Donald Trump Jr complained on Twitter that CNN had refused to run the advert, CNN replied saying the commercial was “racist”.

“CNN has made it abundantly clear in its editorial coverage that this ad is racist. When presented with an opportunity to be paid to take a version of this ad, we declined. Those are the facts,” the network’s communication department tweeted.