Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a longtime Donald Trump supporter who worked as his attorney and spoke at the former president’s Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday, said this week that Haitian immigrants “shouldn't have been taken out of the jungle and placed in the middle of a small town America.”

The racist comments were boosted by Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign on Thursday as they continued to make the case that Trump’s campaign is based in bigotry and dehumanizing rhetoric. The Trump campaign did not immediately return a request for comment.

Giuliani made the remark on a pro-Trump streaming show that bills itself as a discussion of current events “from a Conservative Christian perspective” and that has featured numerous Trump allies and surrogates, including his son Eric. The former mayor made the remark as he was discussing the baseless claims made by Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, that Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, Ohio, were eating neighborhood pets.

“Now it may not be true. It may be exaggerated, it may be insane, it may be whatever. But here's what it accomplished. It brought attention to Springfield,” Giuliani said. “If you've got a lot of these people here, and look, I'm going to say this, it's not their fault. They lived back 200 years ago. They just shouldn't have been taken out of the jungle and placed in the middle of small town America, that's ridiculous. Or big town America, for that matter.”

Giuliani, who played a key role in Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, has a long history of racist statements and falsely claimed “Palestinians are taught to kill us at two years old” at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday.

“They may have good people, I’m sorry, I don’t take a risk with people that are taught to kill Americans at two,” Giuliani said. “I'm on the side of Israel. You're on the side of Israel. Donald Trump's on the side of Israel. And they're on the side of the terrorists.”

The death toll from more than a year of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza has passed 43,000, Palestinian officials reported Monday, more than half of whom are women and children. A mother and her five children — some of them adults — and a second mother with six children, were among the 70 people killed in an Israeli strike on an apartment building in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya on Tuesday, according to local authorities.

Last week, Giuliani was ordered by a federal judge to turn over his New York City apartment, 26 luxury watches and a 1980 Mercedes once owned by movie star Lauren Bacall to two Georgia election workers who won a $148 million defamation judgment against him for false claims he made about them in connection to the 2020 presidential election. They said Giuliani pushed Trump’s lies about the election being stolen, which led to death threats that made them fear for their lives.