Former Trump Campaign Manager Says Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren 'Want to Have Illegal Aliens Come Across This Border and Kill Americans'

President Donald Trump's former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, lashed out at the U.S. leader's Democratic 2020 rivals on Tuesday, accusing Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren of wanting to allow "illegals to come across the border and kill Americans."

Asked on the Fox Business Network what he thinks of Warren as a candidate, Lewandowski, who ran Trump's 2016 campaign from January 2015 to June 2016, said: "I think if the Democratic party wants to get beat in the worst electoral loss since Ronald Reagan's re-election, then they should absolutely make Elizabeth Warren their nominee.

"Look, she is going to win in California, she is going to win in New York and she is going to win in Massachusetts. But she won't win in the middle part of America, like North Dakota and South Dakota and Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania and those places where people care about their jobs, where they're proud to be Americans again—and they should be unapologetic about that.

"That's what Donald Trump has delivered for this country. Being proud to say that you're American again, to be unapologetic about being American," Lewandowski said.

Lewandowski then continued his attack on Warren and Sanders, asserting that "they're avowed socialists."

He claimed: "They wanna redistribute your wealth. Anybody who's made something successful, they want to take it away from you."

He then turned towards the two Democratic presidential candidates' platforms on immigration, claiming: "They want to have illegal aliens come across this border and kill Americans. And they think that's what America stands for? I don't agree at all."

Despite Lewandowski's claims, research has time and time again suggested that immigrants in the U.S. are less likely to commit crime than native-born Americans.

In one such study, published by the libertarian Cato Institute in February, researchers analyzed criminal conviction data for 2015 provided by the Texas Department of Public Safety, finding that native-born residents were significantly more likely to be convicted of a crime than immigrants who were either in the country legally or illegally.

Another study published in the journal Criminology did a state-by-state analysis between the years 1990 to 2014, finding that that states with larger shares of undocumented immigrants were more likely to have lower crime rates than states with smaller immigrant populations.

Still, Trump and his administration have repeatedly sought to characterize immigrants as "criminals" and while the U.S. leader had previously promised to focus on detaining criminals in immigration enforcement, the number of immigrant detainees convicted of serious crimes has dropped dramatically under his watch, according to The Center for Public Integrity.