We watched 20 Trump rallies. His racist, anti-immigrant messaging is getting darker.

Donald Trump vowed to “rescue” the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado, from the rapists, “blood thirsty criminals,” and “most violent people on earth” he insists are ruining the “fabric” of the country and its culture: immigrants.

Trump’s message in Aurora, a city that has become a central part of his campaign speeches in the final stretch to Election Day, marks another example of how the former president has escalated his xenophobic and racist rhetoric against migrants and minority groups he says are genetically predisposed to commit crimes . The supposed threat migrants pose is the core part of the former president’s closing argument, as he promises his base that he’s the one who can save the country from a group of people he calls “animals,” “stone cold killers,” the “worst people,” and the “enemy from within.”

He is no longer just talking about keeping immigrants out of the country, building a wall and banning Muslims from entering the United States. Trump now warns that migrants have already invaded, destroying the country from inside its borders, which he uses as a means to justify a second-term policy agenda that includes building massive detention camps and conducting mass deportations.

In his lengthy speech Friday, Trump delivered a broadside against the thousands of Venezuelan migrants in Aurora. And he declared that he would use the Alien Enemies Act, which allows a president to authorize rounding up or removing people who are from enemy countries in times of war, to pursue migrant gangs and criminal networks.

“Kamala [Harris] has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world … from prisons and jails and insane asylums and mental institutions, and she has had them resettled beautifully into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens,” he said.

His rhetoric has veered more than ever into conspiracy theories and rumors, like when he amplified false claims about Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating pets . And Trump has demonized minority groups and used increasingly dark, graphic imagery to talk about migrants in every one of his speeches since the Sept. 10 presidential debate, according to a POLITICO review of more than 20 campaign events. It’s a stark escalation over the last month of what some experts in political rhetoric, fascism, and immigration say is a strong echo of authoritarians and Nazi ideology.

“He’s been taking Americans and his followers on a journey since really 2015 conditioning them … step by step instilling hatred in a group, and then escalating,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University who writes about authoritarianism and fascism and has been outspoken about the dangers of a second Trump administration.

“So immigrants are crime. Immigrants are anarchy. They’re taking their jobs, but now they’re also animals who are going to kill us or eat our pets or eat us,” she continued. “That’s how you get people to feel that whatever is done to them, as in mass deportation, rounding them up, putting them in camps, is OK.”

The Trump campaign said while the “media obsesses over rhetoric,” the former president is responding to voters’ concerns.

“The American people care about results that impact their lives. President Trump will take action to deport Kamala’s illegal immigrants and secure the border on day one. That’s what Americans want to hear,” Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to POLITICO.

Trump has long deployed racist attacks for political gain, including spreading conspiracy theories about whether former President Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, was born in the United States. And when he launched his first campaign in 2015, Trump said Mexico was “not sending its best,” calling immigrants from the country “rapists” who are bringing in crime and drugs. He also promised that day to build a “great big wall.”

But times have changed, and so has he.

The country has moved to the right on immigration — including the Democratic Party and Trump’s opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants. Trump repeatedly bashed Harris as “dumb,” questioned her racial identity and has called her a “DEI” candidate — perpetuating the idea that women and people of color can only be in positions of power because of quotas and preferential treatment.

Harris has touted her record prosecuting transnational gangs, drug cartels and human traffickers and has promised strict enforcement at the Southern border — an effort to appease Americans’ concern about illegal migration. The vice president has vowed to go even further than the Biden administration’s crackdown on asylum.

As the political conversation around immigration has shifted, Trump has not only intensified his rhetoric, but his policy plans.

He has increasingly targeted specific communities, including Springfield, Ohio, Charleroi, Pennsylvania and Aurora, arguing that immigrants are destroying American towns and cities across the country and using those examples to call for large-scale federal response. Trump has spent the last month on the trail elevating the claims about those communities — even as local officials have been denying these allegations and asking the Republican nominee to stand down .

Trump on Friday used false stories about gang takeovers in Aurora as he announced he would remove migrants connected to gangs under an “Operation Aurora” based on presidential wartime powers under the Alien Enemies Act. (While police in Aurora have encountered some gang activity tied to a Venezuelan group, there has been no gang takeover in Colorado.)

“Efforts to blame outsiders, a politically voiceless group, which Trump is an expert at doing, has led to atrocities in the United States — everything from Japanese internment to Operation Wetback,” said Ediberto Román, a Florida International University law professor who studies xenophobia and immigration.

Vivid imagery, such as telling crowds of rally attendees that migrants will “cut your throat,” are now a staple of Trump’s speeches. He cites cases of U.S. women and girls allegedly murdered by immigrants in the country illegally, even as studies have shown that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born Americans.

But Trump says they are — because they are inherently worse people. He’s told nearly all-white crowds in the past that they have “good genes,” even before his explicit suggestion this week that non-white immigrants are genetically inferior — when he told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that migrants have “bad genes.”

“What is so jarring to me is these are not just Nazi-like statements. These are actual Nazi sentiments,” said Robert Jones, founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, the author of “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy” and a vocal critic of Trump’s rhetoric. “Hitler used the word vermin and rats multiple times in Mein Kampf to talk about Jews. These are not accidental or coincidental references. We have clear, 20th century historical precedent with this kind of political language, and we see where it leads.”