Former President Donald Trump is once again intensifying his anti-immigration rhetoric and catching heat for referring to America as a "garbage can for the world."
Trump compared the U.S. to a trash receptacle during a rally in Tempe, Arizona on Thursday while suggesting that Vice President Kamala Harris had filled the country with human "garbage" by orchestrating "an invasion of criminal migrants."
"When Kamala came in, she dismantled our border and threw open the gates... to an invasion of criminal migrants from prisons and jails, from insane asylums and mental institutions, from all over the world," he said. "We're a dumping ground. We're like a garbage can for the world. That's what's happened. That's what's happened to our -- we're like a garbage can."
"It's the first time I've ever said that," Trump continued. "Every time I come up and talk about what they've done to our country, I get angrier and angrier. First time I've ever said garbage can, but you know what? It's a very accurate description."
Trump asserted that 181 other countries, specifically naming Venezuela and the Congo, are emptying their prisons into the United States. However, political analysts say there is no evidence of that happening.
In Houston on Friday, Harris told reporters that Trump's anti-immigration rhetoric "belittles our country."
"This is someone 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 of America is trash," Harris said, per ABC News. "And I think, again, the president of the United States should be someone who elevates discourse and talks about the best of who we are and invest in the best of who we are, not someone like Donald Trump, who is constantly demeaning and belittling who the American people are."
Despite there being "no evidence" to support Trump's remarks, political analyst Mark Sandilow said the words alone are damaging enough.
"It's not as if Donald Trump created xenophobia in the United States. I mean, that's been around forever. And it's not as if he has necessarily created even the current anger at immigrants," Sandilow told KCBS Radio. "But he certainly has exploited it in a way by spreading things, whether it's cats and dogs being eaten in Springfield, Ohio to the fact that the United States is a garbage can."
"That makes it very, very difficult for the overwhelming number of immigrants, both documented and undocumented," Sandilow added. "It makes life more difficult for people when so many Americans listen to this and actually believe that some of it might be true."