Donald Trump detours from battleground states on Friday to visit a Colorado suburb in the news for illegal immigration. He often uses false or misleading claims to spread the message that migrants are causing chaos in smaller American cities and towns.

Trump’s rally in Aurora will be the first time before the November election that either presidential campaign has visited Colorado, which votes reliably Democratic across the state.

The Republican candidate has long vowed to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history and has made immigration a core part of his political persona since the day he launched his first campaign in 2015. In recent months, Trump has identified certain smaller communities that have experienced large influxes of migrants, where local tensions are flaring over resources and some longtime residents are expressing distrust of sudden demographic changes.

Aurora came into the spotlight in August when a video circulated showing armed men walking through an apartment building housing Venezuelan migrants. Trump has made extensive claims that Venezuelan gangs are taking over buildings, although authorities say it was a single block of the suburb and the area is safe again.

Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, have also spread falsehoods about a community in Springfield, Ohio, where Haitian immigrants have been accused of stealing and eating pets.

“It’s like an invasion from within, and we’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country, and we’re going to start with Springfield and Aurora,” Trump said at a news conference in California last month.

While Ohio and Colorado are uncompetitive in the presidential race, the Republican message on immigration is aimed at small towns in competitive states. Vance recently campaigned in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where refugees from Africa and Asia have been resettled in recent months, and promoted Trump’s plan to increase deportations. He argues that smaller communities have been “overrun” by immigrants who tax local resources.

Trump has vowed to deport not just “criminals” – a promise he shares with Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic rival, but also Haitians living legally in Springfield and even people he calls “pro-Hamas radicals.” “ has denigrated those protesting on university campuses. Trump has said he will revoke temporary protected status that allows Haitians to stay in the United States because of widespread poverty and violence in their home country.

Trump has repeatedly accused Harris and President Joe Biden of allowing record-breaking numbers of arrivals, saying it is fueling violent crime, even as the numbers show a continued downward trend following a spike in crime during the coronavirus pandemic.

During the election campaign, Trump uses specific cases of murders or attacks in which the suspects are immigrants who came to the country illegally. He has referred to them as “animals” and suggested earlier this week that those suspected in murder cases have “bad genes.”

Chris Haynes, an associate professor of political science at the University of New Haven who has written a book about public opinion on immigration policy and studied the former president’s messages on immigration, says this is part of what he calls “episodic branding.” That could cause some moderate voters to rethink who they want to support, he said.

“What worked for him from the beginning was to denigrate immigrants but also try to make people feel like they were a threat,” Haynes said, saying some of the rhetoric also appealed to low-propensity voters. which are part of his base.

Like Biden before he gave up his re-election bid, Harris, a Democrat, has pivoted to the right on immigration and is presenting herself as a candidate who can be tough on policing the border, seen as one of her biggest vulnerabilities.

“What Kamala did to illegal migrants is the biggest crime story of our time, because hundreds of thousands of people will soon be victims,” Trump said in a recent speech in Erie, Pennsylvania, before announcing he would send federal law enforcement “to every city in Pennsylvania and every city in the United States of America that has been taken over by migrant gangs.”

Jeffrey Balogh, an Erie resident, said at the event that Trump’s immigration proposals are close to his heart. He shared that he recently felt uncomfortable when he was renting chairs from a company and five men who spoke a foreign language were standing outside waiting for a bus.

“No one spoke a bit of English,” he said. “You see a completely different environment.”

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Gomez reported from Fort Lauderdale, Florida.