ERIE, Pa. — Former President Donald Trump said during a rally here Sunday that Vice President Kamala Harris should be “impeached and prosecuted” for her actions related to the southern U.S. border.
He argued that people were “murdered because of her action at the border, and thousands more will follow in rapid succession,” adding, “She should be impeached and prosecuted for her actions.”
Trump’s comments came after she visited the U.S.-Mexico border last week.
Trump’s call to prosecute Harris comes as he has increasingly threatened to go after other political foes if he is elected. He has talked about jailing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and discussed possibly carrying out election fraud prosecutions against election officials, donors and operatives.
Trump also lobbed personal attacks at Harris on Sunday, echoing comments from his rally the day before, at which he called the vice president “mentally disabled” and “mentally impaired.”
Since Harris took over as the Democratic presidential nominee, Trump has gone after her in personal terms, often based around her race and gender.
When discussing the border, Harris has often pointed to Trump’s role in quashing a bipartisan border deal in Congress in February, which Democrats and several Republicans have said would have addressed aspects of the issue that he frequently invokes on the campaign trail.
“Even though Donald Trump tried to sabotage the border security bill, it is my pledge to you that as president of the United States, I will bring it back up and proudly sign it into law,” Harris said last week.
An NBC News poll conducted this month found that 54% of registered voters thought Trump would better handle securing the border and controlling immigration, compared with 33% who said the same of Harris. Trump has worked to capitalize on those figures, frequently attempting to pin millions of illegal border crossings since President Joe Biden took office on Harris and terming her the administration’s “border czar.”
Trump’s comments about Harris’ mental fitness echoed attacks he made a day earlier at another rally in Wisconsin.
“Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way,” Trump falsely claimed on Saturday.
“Think about it: Only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country,” he added. “Anybody would know this.”
On Sunday, Trump doubled down, saying, “Crooked Joe Biden became mentally impaired — sad. But lying Kamala Harris, honestly, I believe she was born that way.”
Minutes later, he called Harris a “stupid person,” and the crowd responded with chants of “lock her up.”
When asked for clarification about Trump’s comments about Harris’ mental state, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said that Harris is “wholly unfit to serve as president, as evidenced by the shocking ICE numbers that were released last week detailing her abhorrent dereliction of duty of not securing the border allowing murderers, rapists, and convicted criminals to pour into our country to terrorize communities.”
Data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that 13,000 migrants convicted of homicide are living in the U.S. outside of immigration detention. A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security told NBC News that the data goes back four decades, predating the Biden administration.
NBC News has reached out to the Harris campaign for comment on Trump’s Sunday remarks.
In a Saturday statement on Trump’s rally that day, Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said that Trump has “nothing ‘inspiring’ to offer the American people, just darkness.”
“The American people deserve better than Trump’s bleak, backward-looking Project 2025 agenda,” she added.
Some Republicans also pushed back on Trump’s Saturday comments.
When asked by ABC News whether he approved of Trump’s language invoking “mentally impaired” and “mentally disabled,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., said, “I think we should stick on the issues.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., was confronted with a clip of Trump’s remarks during an interview on CNN.
“I just think the better course to take is to prosecute the case that her policies are destroying the country, they’re crazy liberal,” he said.
Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican who is running for Senate, said in a CBS News interview that Trump’s comments were “insulting, not only to the vice president, but to people that actually do have mental disabilities.”
Hogan, whose prospects of winning in blue Maryland would likely be weakened if he were associated with the former president, has said that neither Trump nor Harris has “earned my vote.”
Jake Traylor reported from Erie. Megan Lebowitz reported from Washington, D.C.
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