Former President Donald Trump was in the Southwest on Thursday for rallies, including the first of the day in Tempe, Ariz., where he darkly portrayed immigrants as violent invaders and promised his planned mass deportations, praised former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and described his Democratic opponent in Vice President Kamala Harris as “low IQ.”

Trump has continued to hammer home his plans for “largest deportation program in American history” in the final weeks of the campaign, portraying immigrants as violent, “bloodthirsty criminals” and laying the blame for their victims’ suffering at the feet of Harris and President Joe Biden. His solution is to deport millions of people, using the military and local police forces to carry out the mass-expulsion of undocumented immigrants.

“Under the Trump administration, we will achieve complete and total victory over these sadistic monsters. We will reclaim our territory. We will restore the sovereign borders of the United States of America, and we will put the cartels quickly out of business,” Trump said. “I will rescue every town across America that's been invaded and conquered. These towns have been conquered.”

Election Day, on Tuesday, Nov. 5, “will be called Liberation Day in America. We’re going to be liberated,” the Republican presidential nominee added. 

Trump is scheduled to be in Las Vegas later on Thursday night for a rally with Turning Point Action, the political arm of the far-right youth organization Turning Point USA. 

As he spoke in Tempe, he referred to the United States as “a garbage can for the world,” baselessly claiming other countries were sending criminals and mentally ill people to immigrate, specifically naming Venezuela and “the Congo in Africa.” He went on to repeatedly and graphically describe incidents of violent crime committed or suspected to be committed by immigrants where the victims were U.S. citizens — a U.S. Marine, a pair of teenage girls, tourists in New York City’s Times Square — and blaming Harris. 

“Thank you very much, Kamala. We appreciate it,” Trump said, adding the vice president “is also actively aiding and abetting the worst, human traffickers, child smugglers, drug dealers, blood thirsty criminal networks — we have them all — the worst murderers in the world.”

“Immigrants are 30 percent less likely to be incarcerated than are U.S.-born individuals who are white,” a Stanford University report from last year found. The right-wing Cato Institute reported in 2020 that immigrants, regardless of their legal status, were less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. The latest FBI data also shows an overall drop in crime through the first six months of 2024.

Trump later called Harris a “low IQ person” for opposing mass deportations, turning to the 92-year-old Arpaio in the crowd and asking “can you believe it?” He praised the former longtime sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County as “one of the greats of all time” who “didn’t play games at the border” and instructed the crowd to give him a standing ovation.

Arpaio, a longtime ally of Trump’s who the former president pardoned of a federal contempt charge before leaving office, ran a tent city prison in Phoenix for nearly 24 years and often illegally held undocumented immigrants there. He described the prison himself as a “concentration camp.” Arpaio was frequently sued for violating civil rights in federal court, including by the Department of Justice. Trump’s campaign has pledged to build massive camps near the border to hold immigrants who were rounded up before they can be deported.

Trump has unleashed a special array of personal attacks against Harris, from calling her “lazy” — a word long used to demean Black people in racist terms — to insisting she’s a “stupid person." He’s also called Harris, the first woman of color to lead a major-party ticket, “slow.”

In his remarks at Arizona State University in Tempe, Trump also promised the death penalty for “any migrant” who kills a U.S. citizen or law enforcement officer and to ban undocumented immigrants from any federal benefits program. At one point, he said if Harris wins “you’ll have 200 million people” immigrating to the U.S. Trump pinned the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. currently at 21 million, but it’s likely a far smaller population than that.

And he referred to journalists as “the enemy of the people,” after saying last week the military or National Guard should be used on Election Day against “the enemy from within.” That comment sparked his former chief of staff, John Kelly, to come out this week and call his old boss a “fascist” and recount Trump’s alleged praise of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany during his first term. Trump denies the recollections of his longest-serving chief of staff and has insulted him as weak and dumb on social media. 

“They’re the enemy of the people, they are. They’re the enemy of the — I’ve been asked not to say it. I don't want to say it. They're the enemy of the people,” Trump said on Thursday of the press. “And someday they're not going to be the enemy of the people, I hope.”

Harris’ campaign called the rally “angry and dark” in a statement and said Trump’s remark that he had been “asked not to say it” was “a telling sign that Trump’s campaign advisors seem to know that Trump’s unhinged rhetoric is a liability with voters.”

At a Turning Point event in Las Vegas later in the day, Trump claimed towns had been “invaded and conquered” by violent immigrants, adding: “We have a lot of towns that haven’t yet been infected.” Trump has long echoed tropes about immigration in portraying migrants as spreading disease, dating back to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trump views immigration as the issue that won him the White House in 2016. He accuses Harris of perpetrating “a wicked betrayal of America” and having “orchestrated the most egregious betrayal that any leader in American history has ever inflicted upon our people,” even though crime is down.

While migrants have been charged for some high profile crimes that Trump repeatedly highlights, research has shown that immigrants — including those who entered the country illegally — are charged with fewer violent crimes than American citizens.

He has also spread false theories that Democrats are registering immigrants without legal status to vote.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.