Clinton appeals to Nevada Latinos in emotional ad

Liz Goodwin
·Senior National Affairs Reporter

The Clinton campaign released a heart-tugging ad Thursday morning in Nevada, featuring a 10-year-old girl who is worried her parents will be deported.

“My parents, they have a letter of deportation. I’m scared they are going to be deported,” the girl says to Clinton in the ad, filmed at a Las Vegas event last Sunday.

The former secretary of state tells the girl to come up to her. She pulls her on her lap and hugs her.

“Let me do the worrying. I’ll do all the worrying,” she says, adding that the girl is being very brave, and will need to be brave. “I’ll do everything I can to help, OK?”

Clinton and Sanders are vying for the Hispanic vote in Nevada on Saturday’s caucus, which in 2008 made up 15 percent of voters. Clinton tends to poll stronger with minorities, and Nevada is the first early state that more closely resembles the country as a whole, demographically. (Iowa and New Hampshire are overwhelmingly white.) But her support in the state has been slipping in recent weeks, leaving her in a statistical tie with Sanders in the latest poll.

SLIDESHOW – Clinton and Sanders go head-to-head in Nevada >>>

At the last Democratic debate, Sanders repeatedly hit Clinton on immigration, homing in on her position that Central American unaccompanied minors fleeing violent home countries should be deported as a way of sending a message to families not to send their children on the dangerous journey north alone. Clinton has had trouble defending that position, which she shares with the Obama administration, without sounding cold.

“These are children who are leaving countries and neighborhoods where their lives are at stake,” Sanders said at the debate. “That was the fact. I don’t think we use them to send a message. I think we welcome them into this country and do the best we can to help them get their lives together.”

Sanders refused to vote for a 2007 reform bill that would have legalized millions of immigrants because of concerns he had about its guest worker program. Clinton voted for the bill.