Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday doubled down on his widely criticized comments about immigration by suggesting that people crossing the border illegally into the United States are “destroying the blood of our country.”

“They dump them on the border, and they pour into our country, and nobody said to check them,” Trump said at a campaign event in Waterloo, Iowa.

“They’re destroying the blood of our country. That’s what they’re doing. They’re destroying our country.”

The remark comes after Trump said at a rally in New Hampshire on Saturday that immigrants entering the U.S. are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

“They let — I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country. When they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump said on Saturday.

Trump repeated the claim on Truth Social on Saturday night, saying in all caps, “Illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation. They’re coming from prisons, from mental institutions — from all over the world.”

Trump’s remarks over the weekend quickly drew sharp criticism from President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign which likened the remark to Adolf Hitler’s use of the term “blood poisoning” in his manifesto “Mein Kampf,” to denigrate immigration and the mixing of races.

Read Related Also: Shooting by Park Police among latest in a violent year for local law officers

Trump brushed off the comparison to Hitler on Tuesday, suggesting that he “never read Mein Kampf,” and that Hitler made the comment “in a much different way.”

Trump’s ex-wife Ivana Trump said that he kept an anthology of Hitler’s speeches called My New Order in a cabinet beside his bed, according to “Confidence Man,” a Trump biography written by New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman. According to Haberman, Trump told another reporter his friend “gave me a copy of Mein Kampf.”

Trump’s comments this week are not the first time that he invoked “the blood of our country” when making derisive comments about immigrants.

During an interview with The National Pulse in September, Trump suggested at the time that undocumented immigrants traversing the U.S.-Mexico border are “poisoning the blood of our country.”