Former President Trump Claims Immigrants are Damaging the Country's "Blood"

For the second time in a week, former President Donald Trump told crowds of supporters that immigrants coming to the U.S. illegally were damaging the "blood" of the country, echoing words used by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. 

"It's true that they're destroying the blood of our country. That's what they're doing," Trump told Iowans at a commit-to-caucus event in Waterloo Tuesday evening. "They don't like it when I said that and I never read 'Mein Kampf.' They said, 'Oh, Hitler said that in a much different way.'"

In Hitler's manifesto "Mein Kampf," the dictator wrote that, "All great cultures of the past perished only because the original creative race died out from blood poisoning."

Trump also suggested that illegal aliens could "bring in disease" and crime to the U.S. 

He told voters at a rally on Saturday in Durham, New Hampshire that illegal immigrants coming into the U.S. were "poisoning the blood of the country," prompting swift backlash from the White House and Republican leaders on Capitol Hill. 

President Biden's Re-election Campaign Responds to Trump's New Hampshire Comments

The campaign for President Joe Biden wasted no time in calling out former President Donald Trump for his controversial comments made in New Hampshire.

"Donald Trump channeled his role models as he parroted Adolf Hitler, praised Kim Jong Un and quoted Vladimir Putin while running for president on a promise to rule as a dictator and threaten American democracy," said Ammar Moussa, spokesperson for the Biden-Harris campaign.

Trump's comments were first made in an interview with the right-leaning news website, the National Pulse, where he referred to illegal immigrants as "poisoning the blood of the country."

"Nobody has ever seen anything like we're witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It's poisoning the blood of our country," Trump said at the time.

Supporters Stand by Trump's Anti-Immigration Rhetoric

Despite the backlash, supporters at a rally in Waterloo, Iowa, expressed their unwavering support for Trump and his stance on immigration.

"That's a very good comment. I think he's probably the only one that can address exactly what he meant," said Jeanine Ann Tellin, a farmer from Iowa, in an interview with CBS News. "I'm not going to speak for him or against him on that issue but I do see that, you know, not all of the people coming in that are immigrants are children and women. There's a lot of men coming in."