'Animals': Trump ups rhetoric on illegal immigration

STORY: Donald Trump called immigrants who were illegally in the United States "not human" in a speech in Michigan on Tuesday, as he intensified his focus on border issues with incendiary rhetoric on his campaign trail.

The Republican presidential candidate spoke in Grand Rapids, appearing with several law enforcement officers.

He focused on several criminal cases involving suspects who may have been in the country illegally and labelled them as sub-human.

"The 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia who was barbarically murdered by an illegal alien animal. The Democrats say, 'please don't call them animals, they're humans.' I said 'no, they're not humans, they're animals.'"

Trump also described meeting the family of Ruby Garcia, a local 25-year-old murdered last month.

Police say a suspect in the case was in the country illegally.

Garcia's sister denied the former president spoke with the family, according to local media reports, which also said she was angry about her sister's death being used as a political tool.

Trump titled his Michigan speech "Biden's border bloodbath" and warned that chaos would consume America if he did not win the election in November.

"This is country changing, it's country threatening and it's country wrecking. They have wrecked our country. But I stand before you today to declare that Joe Biden's border bloodbath, and that's what it is. It's a bloodbath.

... if we don't win in November 5th, I think our country is going to cease to exist."

Later on Tuesday, he gave a similar speech in Wisconsin, calling the 2024 election the nation's "final battle."

"...prisoners, murderers, drug dealers, mental patients, terrorists..."

Trump frequently claims that immigrants crossing the border with Mexico had escaped from prisons and asylums in their home countries and are fueling violent crime in the United States.

While available data on criminals' immigration status is sparse, researchers say the violent crime rate is not higher among those in the U.S. illegally than native-born Americans.

Some 38% of Republicans, and about one in five independents, say immigration is the country's top issue in a Reuters/Ipsos poll released late February.

Democratic President Joe Biden's campaign team said Trump is "engaging in extreme rhetoric that promotes division, hate and violence in our country."

Biden, who is Trump's rival in the November presidential election, also accused Trump of pushing Republican lawmakers to block bipartisan legislation that would have beefed up border security and brought in measures to reduce illegal immigration.

Michigan and Wisconsin are two swing states that could determine who returns to the White House next year.

Although both Trump and Biden have mathematically clinched their presidential nominations, they were still on their party's presidential primary ballots in Wisconsin on Tuesday.