Donald Trump has again promised to prosecute people he accuses of “cheating” in the 2024 election. “And if we can, we’ll go back to the last one, if we’re allowed,” Trump said, after again acknowledging that he did, indeed, lose the 2020 election “by just a little bit.”

Trump, the former president and Republican presidential candidate seeking a return to the White House, was in Prairie Du Chein, Wisconsin, on Saturday, holding a campaign event largely focused on immigration. Boards showing mugshots of undocumented migrants accused of violent crimes flanked his lectern. Other boards were bearing the phrases “End Migrant Crime” and “Deport Illegals Now.”

After comparing the “thousands and thousands” of people he said were waiting outside of the building to the receptions that famed aviator Charles Lindbergh was given in New York (Lindbergh died in 1974, at 72 years of age), Trump spent much of his time Saturday attacking immigrants, and the Biden-Harris White House’s role in managing illegal immigration.

“Well, you got a lot of killers in our country. You saw that yesterday, last night, after four straight years of obliterating our border, I watched this show that she put on — four years of the most incompetent border anywhere in the world in history, Kamala Harris traveled to the scene. In fact, she stood near where I put up border wall. That was her backdrop, and in one of the most heinous crimes ever committed by any administration in American history. That’s what she did by allowing these millions of people, millions and millions of people, to come through our border and make our civilization very unsafe,” Trump said.

Polls have frequently found that voters believe Trump will be more effective on immigration than Harris.

Harris on Friday pushed back in an Arizona rally, in which she outlined a series of policy plans, including enforcing stringent asylum policies, better funding for immigration enforcement agencies and ensuring officers have equipment to better detect smuggling at border points of entry.

Trump’s immigration policy plans, as articulated at rallies, have very generally promised mass deportation and using local law enforcement to aid in said deportation.

Harris, he said, is responsible for “erasing” the southern border of the United States, adding that he believes “what she has done is a total disqualifier.”

To illustrate his point, Trump figuratively waved a letter released this week by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in response to a data request from Rep. Tony Gonzalez, R-Texas. That letter notes that hundreds of thousands of immigrants convicted of and charged with violent crimes are currently on ICE’s non-detained docket.

The letter, signed by ICE Deputy Director Patrick Lechleitner, notes that ICE is legally not allowed to release certain noncitizens from its custody during deportation proceedings, and that most who are convicted of homicide are not eligible for release from ICE custody. Lechleitner also notes that officers “may use their discretion in making custody determinations and release noncitizens with conditions,” on a case-by-case basis. ICE describes its “Alternatives to Detention” process on its website, noting that the program “enables noncitizens to remain in their communities…as they move through immigration proceedings or prepare for departure.” More than 4.5 million immigrants were overseen on the non-detention docket through July 2022, according to the site.

Trump treated that information as damning, insisting that Harris is responsible for all of the “rapists, gang members, drug dealers and the traffickers in women, mostly women,” he says have been part of “this mass migrant invasion.”

“They want to invade, they want to take over your homes. They want to take over your buildings. Look at what they’re doing in Colorado — Aurora, Colorado. Venezuelan gangs are taking over real estate. They’re real estate developers, like I was, but they do it with a gun. I did it with bank financing.” (Aurora officials have rebuked Trump’s claims, saying that no parts or buildings within the city have been “taken over” by gangs.)

Trump cited the local case of Alejandro Jose Coronel Zarate, an immigrant illegally in the United States, who has been touted as evidence that immigrants are committing crimes across the United States, not just in southern border states. Prosecutors charged Coronel Zarate on Sept. 18 with sexual assault, child abuse, strangulation and domestic abuse. His lawyers declined comment to the Associated Press.

Prairie du Chien Police Chief Kyle Teynor posted statements on Facebook saying that Coronel Zarate is not a U.S. citizen and that he had two fake immigration documents, including a fake Social Security card. The chief added that Coronel Zarate’s tattoos indicate he’s affiliated with the Tren de Aragua gang, which started in Venezuelan prisons and is posing a growing threat in the U.S.

Speaking to the crowd Saturday, Teynor stressed that Coronel Zarate is the only Venezuelan gang member his agency has encountered, but the violence his two alleged victims suffered at his hands earlier this month was very real.

Trump also insisted that immigration isn’t just an issue from South America or Venezuela, a country he frequently mentions and decries at his public events. “The Congo, their jails are almost empty. The Congo, in Africa, they took them out. They bring them into our country. Many, many countries their jails are empty. Some are empty. Some are much less than that,” Trump said, repeating an accusation that he has repeatedly offered, though never with sourcing. “I would do the same thing. I would have been better than any of them,” he added.

The former president also insisted that Springfield, Ohio, is “in big trouble.” Earlier this month, Trump and his running mate, Ohio U.S. Senator JD Vance, repeated debunked rumors that Haitian immigrants to the city were killing and eating pets within the city. Trump did not repeat that lie on Saturday, but said that that the town is “destroyed,” and complained that migrants “don’t speak the language, they don’t have the culture...everything’s different.”

However, Trump also spent much of his hour and fifteen minutes behind the lectern meandering across topics, attacking Harris and President Joe Biden with less policy-based, less-substantive insults. He called both “mentally impaired” — Harris twice — and said that he has a body more “beautiful” than that of “Sleepy Joe.” He complained about the branding of climate change, derided Harris’s economist father and blamed the two assassination attempts against him for being unable to hold an outdoor rally. He called Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban “one of the toughest, smartest people,” before sharing a compliment Orban offered toward Trump. He insisted that the wars between Ukraine and Russia and between Israel and Hamas would never have happened under his watch.

Trump also revisited his 2016 and 2020 elections, as he often does at his campaign events. The 2020 election was “rigged,” he again claimed.

“Think of it, more votes than any sitting president in the history of our country, we lost by just a little bit, just a little bit,” Trump said, before promising that he has “more lawyers” and “more people watching” and that he will “prosecute people who cheat on this election.”

Despite dozens of lawsuits, Trump and his coterie of election-denying attorneys, allies and surrogates have never proven that widespread election fraud caused his defeat to Joe Biden in 2020.

Trump is expected to make his next campaign stop on Sunday in Erie, Pennsylvania.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.