VANDALIA, Ohio - Former President Donald Trump ratcheted up his dehumanizing rhetoric against immigrants Saturday by saying that some who are accused of crimes are “not people.”

“I don’t know if you call them people,” he said at a rally near Dayton, Ohio. “In some cases they’re not people, in my opinion. But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say.”

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, was in Ohio to stump for Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, who is in a tight three-way race for the Republican nomination to challenge Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. Moreno, a businessman, is facing Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose and state Sen. Matt Dolan in Tuesday’s primary.

In his own remarks on immigration Saturday, Moreno said foreigners who come to the United States should learn English.

“We don’t need to vote in five different languages. We learn the language,” said Moreno, a Colombian immigrant, wrongly claiming that English is the national language. “It means you assimilate. You become part of America; America doesn’t become part of you.”

Later in the rally, Trump warned it will be a “bloodbath for the country” if he is not elected. The comment came as he was promising to hike tariffs on foreign-made cars, and it was not clear exactly what Trump was referring to with his admonition.

“Now we’re going to put a 100 percent tariff on every single car that comes across line, and you’re not going to be able to sell those guys - if I get elected,” he said. “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole. That’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.”

Immigration is shaping up to be an explosive issue in the presidential campaign. Trump and President Joe Biden staged dueling visits to Texas border towns last month, castigating each other for a recent surge in illegal immigration.

Trump said the influx of migrants was “a Joe Biden invasion.” Biden blamed Trump for the death of a $20 billion bipartisan bill to increase detention capacity and hire thousands of Border Patrol officers.

Trump’s comments Saturday represent an escalation of his long-harsh language on the topic. Since beginning his 2016 campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists,” Trump has made inflammatory attacks on migrants a theme of all of his campaigns. He accused immigrants in October of “poisoning the blood of our country” - a remark some likened to the “contamination of the blood” concept that Adolf Hitler laid out in “Mein Kampf.” Trump has rejected that comparison and has continued to use similar language.

He has also pledged to launch an unprecedented deportation effort if elected, pointing as inspiration to a 1954 program called “Operation Wetback” that used military-style tactics to remove Mexican immigrants from the country.

“Among my very first actions upon taking office will be to stop the invasion of our country,” Trump said Saturday.