Former President Donald Trump stepped up his anti-immigrant rhetoric at a rally in the Arizona battlefield on Thursday, calling the United States “trash to the world.”
“We are a dumping ground. We are like – we are like a trash can for the world. That is what happened to us. We are like a trash can,” said Trump in a public meeting. Tempe, Arizona, Thursday.
Trump made the comments when he criticized the Biden-Harris administration for handling the border, a major voter issue – especially in Arizona, a border state and a swing state that President Joe Biden returned to Trump by 0.3 percentage points in 2020.
The former president went on to say that criminals and other evil figures from around the world are coming into the country unchecked.
“The first time I ever said ‘trash,'” Trump said. “But you know what? That’s a very accurate description.”
Harris told reporters in Houston on Friday that Trump’s claim that America is “trash to the world” is “demeaning to our country.”
“This is a man who is a former president of the United States, who has a bully pulpit, and this is how he uses it, to tell the rest of the world that somehow the United States is trash,” Harris said. “And I think again, the president of the United States should be someone who raises the issue and talks about the best and invests in the best, not someone like Donald Trump, who constantly humiliates and humiliates who the American people are.”
While the “garbage can” remark may be the first for Trump to utter at a rally, it’s not the first time he’s used anti-immigrant rhetoric — it’s now a common element at events. Since he began campaigning for president this cycle, Trump has said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and called them “criminals” who will “cut your throat.”
Earlier this year, Trump repeated false claims about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating the town’s resident dogs and cats. In particular, Trump cited a baseless claim — which has been amplified by right-wing politicians, including vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance – on the presidential debate stage.
Earlier this month, the former president used anti-immigrant rhetoric during an interview on Newsmax’s “Rob Schmitt Tonight” to disparage the many legal Haitian migrants living in Springfield Ohio, calling temporary protective status a “certain little trick.”
“Look at Springfield, where 30,000 illegal immigrants dropped, and that, they may have done through a certain little trick, but they are illegal immigrants as far as I’m concerned,” said Trump. “They’re ruining the city … they’re going to ruin the country. We can’t let this happen.”
He also called for the roundup and deportation of millions of migrants living in the US without legal permission.
Also in October, the former president suggested he believed migrants had the “gene” to kill people, adding “we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country.”
“How about allowing people to come through the open border – 13,000 who are murderers, many of them kill more than one person, and now they are happy to live in the United States. You know now being a murderer, I believe this. , it’s in the genes and we got a lot bad genes in our country today,” Trump said during an interview on the “Hugh Hewitt Show.”
Despite the fact that US citizens commit crimes at a higher rate than undocumented immigrants, Trump portrayed them as “criminals” who would “cut their throats” at a campaign stop in Wisconsin in September.
“And you remember he didn’t say, no, these are migrants and these migrants, they don’t commit crimes like us,” Trump said. “No, no, they make our criminals look like babies. These are stone cold killers. They’ll come into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.”
Trump also displayed anti-immigrant rhetoric on the White House grounds in 2016 – often labeling them as rapists and drug dealers.
ABC News’ Will McDuffie, Fritz Farrow and Gabriella Abdul-Hakim contributed to this report.