Republicans have seized on the statistic to misleadingly claim that 85,000 children are “missing” or have been forced into “slavery.” A Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigation last year found some migrants being exploited for child labor, but not all of the 85,000 who were no longer in contact with HHS.

In an interview that aired Thursday with the television personality Dr. Phil, Trump repeated the misleading claim about missing migrant children, inflating the number to 88,000 and describing it as “a holocaust.”

“You know, we have 88,000 missing children now,” he said. “Can you imagine if that were Trump that had 88,000 missing children, 88,000? That’s a holocaust. That’s as bad as, I mean, think of it.”

Trump has made immigration a central message of his campaign, often using exaggerated and inflammatory language to describe the surge in southern border crossings. He has vilified and dehumanized migrants by describing them in broad strokes as dangerous criminals, terrorists, mentally ill and carriers of diseases. He has repeatedly suggested that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” which historians said resembled the propaganda of Adolf Hitler.

The Holocaust is the largest and most extensively documented genocide in world history, a systematic campaign of state-sponsored persecution and extermination by Nazi Germany against European Jews and other minority groups between 1933 and 1945, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The methods of murder included mass shootings, large-scale detention and labor camps, poison gas chambers and ovens. The victims included an estimated 1.5 million Jewish children, according to the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel, known as Yad Vashem.

“It’s really inappropriate to compare that to the Holocaust,” said Laurie Marhoefer, a history professor at the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington who studies Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. “The numbers of people are astronomically larger. Those aren’t people who are murdered. He’s just trying to whip up some kind of emotion by using that term. It’s dangerous and it’s really a distortion of what he’s talking about and also a gross misrepresentation of the actual Holocaust.”

Beth Kean, the CEO of the Holocaust Museum L.A., said that while the condition of 85,000 undocumented children is of grave concern, making a false equivalency with the Holocaust is dangerous. “His use of the word trivializes the real meaning of the Holocaust which was the worst genocide in history,” she said. “Such distortion of the truth of the Holocaust — when something is clearly not the systematic murders of millions — can take us down the path towards blatant anti-semitism.”

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung defended the former president’s comments and attacked President Biden’s handling of the border.

“President Trump was talking about the horrors of human trafficking at the border,” he said. “These horrific stories are sadly happening far too often because we have a weak leader in Joe Biden.”

Maria Sacchetti contributed to this report.