Former President Donald Trump said during a rally Tuesday in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that he spoke to the family of a murder victim — a claim quickly contradicted by the family.

Trump briefly mentioned that he spoke to relatives of Ruby Garcia, a 25-year-old Michigan woman allegedly murdered last month by her boyfriend, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico.

“Ruby’s loved ones and community are left grieving for this incredible young woman,” Trump said at the rally. “They said she had just this most contagious laughter and when she walked into a room, she lit up that room — and I’ve heard that from so many people. I spoke to some of her family.”

However, Garcia’s sister, Mavi Garcia, told a local TV station and several other news outlets that Trump had not spoken to anyone in the family.

“He did not speak with any of us, so it was kind of shocking seeing that he had said that he had spoke with us, and misinforming people on live TV,” Mavi Garcia told Target 8, an NBC affiliate in Grand Rapids, on Tuesday.

She also spoke on how Trump has politicised her sister’s death, saying, “It’s always been about illegal immigrants. Nobody really speaks about when Americans do heinous crimes, and it’s kind of shocking why he would just bring up illegals. What about Americans who do heinous crimes like that?”

Research suggests immigrants are actually less likely to commit crimes than US citizens.

Just as he did in 2016, Trump has made crimes by migrants the centerpiece of his campaign for the White House, blaming those crimes on President Joe Biden’s border policy. He pushed Republicans in Congress to abandon a bipartisan bill increasing border enforcement and restricting eligibility for asylum, and he has vowed to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants if he wins the presidency.

“Michigan communities are being ravaged by a new form of crime and that’s the migrant crime that we named it,” Trump said during the rally. “It should be called Biden’s migrant crime, but that’s too long, but you’ll always remember it was Biden that gave it to us.”

In Ruby Garcia’s case, her family and police said she had been dating her alleged murderer. The local prosecutor described it as “another case of a domestic violence homicide that we’ve seen, quite frankly, far too often over the last few years”.