Sen. Lindsey Graham said he understands why some Hispanics don't like Republicans because of Donald Trump, saying “I mean, who's going to vote for somebody that's gonna deport their grandmother?” | Getty Graham sympathizes with Hispanics on Trump: I get why you don't like us

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham on Wednesday sympathized with Hispanics who dislike Republicans, in part because of presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s rhetoric on immigration.

Trump infamously called Mexicans “rapists” when announcing his candidacy last summer and has vowed to build a wall on the southern border that Mexico will pay for and threatened to deport some 11 million undocumented immigrants.


“To the Hispanic community, I get it why you don't like us,” Graham said during the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s Fiscal Summit. “I mean, who's going to vote for somebody that's gonna deport their grandmother?”

Graham has been a consistent, colorful Trump critic, even refusing to support him as the nominee by voting for him this fall despite signing a loyalty pledge last year.

Following Trump’s Cinco de Mayo tweet, in which the billionaire posed with a taco bowl and declared his love for Hispanics, Graham told CNN: “Eating a taco is probably not gonna fix the problems we have with Hispanics. I think embracing Donald Trump is embracing demographic death.”

In March, the former GOP presidential candidate suggested that Trump should have been expelled from the Republican Party and accused him of exacerbating the party’s troubles with Hispanics.

“He took our problems in 2012 with Hispanics and made them far worse by espousing forced deportation,” Graham said then. “Looking back, we should have basically kicked him out of the party.”

Graham expressed disbelief at where the party has gone in just a few years.

“If you had told me in 2013 that by 2016 we'd be running on forced deportation and that Megyn Kelly was a bimbo,” Graham began Wednesday. “We got problems. I hope he adjusts.”

Graham said Republicans can have healthy discourse over any social issue, “but if we're seen as an intolerant group of people, and when it comes to immigration, if we seem to have animosity in our heart more than hope when it comes to fixing the problem, we’re gonna lose the fastest-growing demographic in the country.”

“My worst nightmare has really come true: that we would run a campaign to get to the right of where we were before,” Graham added. “And we're in a ditch, and I don't know if we’ll ever get out of the ditch.”