New York, New York - As Kamala Harris prepares to visit the southern border on Friday, Donald Trump doubled down on racist rhetoric targeting migrants and blasted his rival for the White House.

On the eve of Harris' trip, Trump called the vice president the "architect of this destruction" and said she had "completely destroyed" the southern border with Mexico.

"She should save her airfare. She should go back to the White House and tell the president to close the border," he told reporters at Trump Tower in New York on Thursday.

Trump also repeated his claim that migrants were "infecting our country," using language that President Joe Biden and many others have compared to that used in Nazi Germany.

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"Americans have watched their communities destroyed by this sudden, suffocating inundation of illegal aliens. It's an inundation. It's an invasion," he said.

Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance have in recent weeks played up false stories about Haitian migrants eating pets in the town of Springfield, Ohio.

Their baseless, widely debunked claims triggered a climate of fear in the city's Haitian community – but they doubled down, with Vance even saying he was willing to invent stories so that "the American media actually pays attention."