Donald Trump’s vague responses to pointed questions have caused a stir – again.

During an interview with Yahoo News on Thursday, Trump, whose hard-line views on immigration have been a pillar of his campaign, was asked about whether he’d consider a database to monitor Muslims.

“We’re going to have to look at a lot of things very closely,” he responded. “We’re going to have to look at the mosques. We’re going to have to look very, very carefully.”

Since the terrorist attacks in Paris last week, Trump has voiced strong opposition to allowing Syrian refugees into the U.S.. The Islamic State extremists who control parts of Syria and Iraq have claimed responsibility for the attacks, and a Syrian passport was found near the body of one of the suicide bombers, but it remains unclear whether it is authentic.

Trump has also questioned in recent days whether America is safe in regards to Muslims -- millions of whom are U.S. citizens -- and he has hinted at closing mosques should he become president.

Trump’s vague, inflammatory response Thursday was similar to one he gave in September when asked by a supporter at a town-hall meeting how the U.S. could “get rid” of Muslims.

“We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things,” he said at the time. “We’re going to be looking at that and plenty of other things.”

Democrats and Republicans alike have assailed his rhetoric as racist.

And on Thursday, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, himself seeking the Democratic nomination, offered a similar assessment.

Since he launched his bid for president, Trump has been castigated by politicians and pundits alike for his rhetoric toward immigrants, women and others. Yet he’s remained atop polls in a year in which conservative voters have said they appreciate his outspokenness and the fact he’s never held elected office.

A powerful union that recently endorsed Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination unveiled a round of television ads on Thursday attacking Republicans for statements on immigration.

The campaign, launched by the Service Employees International Union, is an effort to mobilize Latino voters on the first anniversary of President Obama's executive actions that sought to protect from deportation up to 5 million people in the U.S. illegally. Obama’s sweeping moves have been on hold for months, tied up in a lawsuit.

Many of the GOP presidential hopefuls have called for the courts to kill Obama’s plan.

"It cannot be the permanent policy of the United States,” Florida Sen. Marco Rubio told reporters recently in Manchester, N.H.

Among the crowded field of Republican presidential hopefuls, though, two camps have emerged on immigration: one, including Rubio and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, have offered more moderate proposals that include an eventual path to legal status for those in the U.S. illegally.

The other group, including Donald Trump, has tapped into a nativist sentiment with more extreme proposals to fix the nation’s broken immigration system. Trump, the front-runner in several national polls, has called for a wall to be built along the U.S.-Mexico border and has said he would push for an end to birthright citizenship for those born in the U.S. to people who are here illegally. He has also pledged to deport millions of people.

For SEIU, its ads are designed to remind voters of how a Republican president would act on immigration. The ads will be broadcast nationwide on both Univision and Telemundo on Thursday and will continue to air through the weekend in states like Colorado, Nevada and Florida – all swing states with large blocs of Latino voters.

In some of the states where the ads will be broadcast, Latino voters continue to increase in large numbers each election cycle. In Colorado, for example, Latinos have increased turnout since 2004, when they registered at 8% of the electorate, to 14% in 2012, according to a study by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. In Nevada, the numbers are similar. The state’s Culinary Union Local 226 has 55,000 members; more than half are Latino, making it the largest organized group of Latinos in the state. (The union, like SEIU, often endorses Democrats.)

SEIU President Rocio Saenz said Republican views on immigration laws will have ramifications in the election.

“We won’t forget,” he said, noting an estimated 28 million Latinos nationally will be eligible to vote next year. “That’s not a swing vote, that’s a warning.”

John Jordan, a lawyer-turned-vintner in Sonoma County, i's among an emerging group of campaign donors who want more control -- more say for their money. Two years ago, he decided to set out on his own to choose the targets he wanted to help. He developed strategies and crafted the messaging, down to the content of the ads.

Jordan followed a model set by the Koch brothers and Tom Steyer, though he has a fraction of their wealth. Still, in the 2014 cycle, the multimillionaire was among the top 25 donors nationwide to groups not tied directly to a candidate or political party, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

This month, Jordan made his first independent move in the 2016 presidential election, airing 60-second ads during the fourth Republican debate touting Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida as the GOP’s best bet to take on Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.

The television and online ads cost more than $100,000 and were funded by a super PAC that Jordan created called Baby Got PAC. The name is an homage to a 1990s hip-hop song celebrating the size of women’s derrieres.

For Jordan, the wordplay reflects his approach to politics and life — fun-loving, scornful of political correctness and disdainful of doing the same thing, or following the same strategy, because that’s how it has always been done.

As Sen. Marco Rubio gains in polls, he is taking on the political baggage that comes from being a candidate on the rise.

Democrats have stepped up their attacks on Rubio, including one Wednesday that dinged the Florida senator for skipping a congressional briefing on the Syrian refugee crisis to attend a $2,700-per-person West Coast fundraiser in Newport Beach.

Team Rubio countered that he had already attended a more detailed classified briefing the night before as part of his role on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The back-and-forth was just the latest in a series of attacks being lobbed from all sides at Rubio, who is viewed by many Democrats the most serious challenge to their front-runner, Hillary Clinton, but is also gaining on his Republican rivals.

A WBUR poll of New Hampshire Republican voters released Wednesday put Rubio now tied at second behind GOP front-runner Donald Trump and a fading Ben Carson.

“What’s he doing? Raising money,” Trump said at a campaign rally after he read the new polling that hoisted Rubio to second place behind him.

Rubio has faced friendly fire from fellow Republicans Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush, as the three battle for attention among voters who still prefer Trump and Carson.

But Democrats have made no secret of their desire to take on Rubio if his own side fails to prevent him from advancing.

Sen. Ted Cruz declared he was offended by President Obama’s comments that Republicans opposing Syrian Muslim refugees are afraid of “widows and orphans,” and challenged Obama to a debate on the subject, calling his words “cheap insults."

"I would encourage you, Mr. President, if you want to insult me, come back and insult me to my face," Cruz told reporters on Capitol Hill. Obama is traveling in the Philippines.

Nearly 30 states’ governors have announced they don’t support taking in Syrian refugees or are considering blocking them from their states, and Cruz has suggested that only Christian refugees be allowed in the U.S. The debate grew feverish in recent days after a Syrian passport was found near the body of one of the Paris attackers, though its veracity hasn't been confirmed. Many fake Syrian passports are in circulation. None of the Paris attackers identified thus far are Syrian, though some are believed to have traveled there.

"When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who is fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted, when some of those folks themselves come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political persecution, that's shameful,” Obama said Monday at the G20 summit in Turkey. “That's not American."

Nearly 9 million people have fled Syria during the country's five-year civil war.

GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum joined Cruz in saying Obama needs to take a more realistic stance on allowing Syrians into the United States. He said that Islamic State’s beheadings and attacks on Christians show why the U.S. should fear allowing potential terrorists into the country.

"While I disagree that accepting Christian refugees is in the long-term security interest of the United States and long-term stability interest of the Middle East, the intent of those who do should never be vilified," Santorum said.

The U.S. "will need to increase our presence on the ground" in the Middle East to combat Islamic State, Jeb Bush said Wednesday, crossing a line that several of his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination have so far sidestepped.

In a speech that his campaign billed as a major address on military policy, the one-time Republican front-runner did not specify how many troops he would send or whether he would have them engage in direct combat against Islamic State terrorists.

"The bulk of these ground troops will need to come from local forces that we have built workable relationships with," said Bush, the former governor of Florida.

But the U.S. "should not delay in leading a global coalition to take out ISIS with overwhelming force," he said, using an acronym for Islamic State. And "while air power is essential, it alone cannot bring the results we seek."