Former President Donald Trump on Thursday vowed to bring legislation to Congress to ban sanctuary cities.

"I will send Congress a bill to ban sanctuary cities in the first day that I become president," he said in a press conference in New York City's Trump Tower, asserting that the residents of such cities and states did not want to harbor illegal aliens.

"We will seal the border. We will stop the invasion, and we will begin the largest deportation of criminals, the criminal element, which is a large portion. We will start that immediately," Trump went on.

He further referenced the post-World War II mass deportations of President Dwight Eisenhower, contending that his deportation plans would eclipse it.

"We will get rid of the drug dealers. We will get rid of the human traffickers. We will get rid of the murderers, the people that came out of jails, and the people that came out of mental institutions," he promised. "They will all be gone, and it'll happen very quickly. We'll be dealing with local law enforcement who knows everything about every one of them, their name, their serial number, they know everything."

Much of the press conference saw Trump excoriate Vice President Kamala Harris over her handling of the southern border in her capacity as "border czar."