Former President Donald Trump and his Republican running mate, U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, rallied at Georgia State University in Atlanta Saturday. It’s the same venue where Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, spoke earlier this week.

The back-to-back campaign rallies offered a dramatic contrast as the rival campaigns scrap over one of the nation’s most competitive battlegrounds.

In his speech, Trump blamed Harris in raw, scathing terms for the brutal killing of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student bludgeoned to death on the campus of the University of Georgia.

“Kamala Harris should not be asking for your vote,” Trump told thousands of supporters during a rally at Georgia State University’s arena in downtown Atlanta. “She should be begging Laken Riley’s family for forgiveness.”

He added that Riley’s “blood is on Kamala Harris’ hands” and that she might as well have been “standing there, watching herself” the brutal slaying.

Riley’s body was discovered Feb. 22 in a wooded area near UGA’s intramural fields. The man charged in her killing, 26-year-old Jose Antonio Ibarra, is a Venezuela national who was arrested in 2022 after unlawfully entering the United States, federal immigration officials said. He has pleaded not guilty.

Trump and other Republicans have long tried to tap into the fury of his party’s conservative base over immigration policies to blame Democrats for her death.

And Trump’s campaign launched an ad blitz in Georgia and other battleground states this week blasting Harris over immigration. At her Atlanta rally this week, she vowed to revive a bipartisan border security deal that Trump helped scuttle.

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