"They infect our country": Trump shares racist anti-immigrant rhetoric in Aurora

Former President Donald Trump ramped up his anti-immigrant rhetoric during a campaign stop in Aurora, Colorado on Friday, suggesting that migrants were spreading disease and that they "infect our country."

Trump shared his plans for mass deportation with the crowd, saying he’d re-enact Title 42: a policy which allowed Trump's administration to reject immigrants from entering the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic for health reasons.

“People come in, they're very sick. Very sick, They're coming into our country, they're very, very sick with highly contagious disease. And they're let into our country to infect our country,” Trump said.

Trump's entire speech in Aurora centered around racist rhetoric around immigrants.  He vowed to use 18th century laws to kick off a wave of deportations and claimed that his widely circulated 2015 claims about immigrants being "rapists" were "right.” The former president called immigrants to the U.S. “the most violent people on Earth.”

Claims of disease crossing the border are not new in the Trump's explicitly nationalist campaign. JD Vance previously suggested without evidence that Haitian immigrants in the U.S. were the cause of “skyrocketing” HIV and tuberculosis diagnoses. At the rally on Friday, Trump repeated his calls to remove Haitian immigrants from the country regardless of their  legal status.

Trump's eugenicist bent has been more apparent on this campaign. In April the ex-president called immigrants “not human.”  and last month he called countries originally targeted by his Muslim ban “infested.” Earlier this week,  Trump argued that immigrants had “bad genes,” making them predisposed to crime.