Vice President Kamala Harris said on Tuesday that former President Donald J. Trump’s unfounded claims about Black migrants in an Ohio city were “hateful rhetoric” and “tropes” that had been “designed to divide us as a country.”

“This is exhausting, and it’s harmful,” she said during an interview with Black journalists in Philadelphia. “And it’s hateful, and grounded in some age-old stuff that we should not have the tolerance for.”

She added, “It’s got to stop.”

Ms. Harris’s remarks on Tuesday at a gathering of the National Association of Black Journalists were her most forceful yet about the Trump campaign’s escalating attacks on migrants and communities of color, and her first time directly addressing the situation in Springfield, Ohio.

Bomb threats have shut down schools and government buildings in the city, after Mr. Trump said at the presidential debate last week that Haitian immigrants there were stealing and eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs — an accusation for which there is no evidence and which many Black Americans and Democrats condemned as racist.

Mr. Trump has continued to amplify the claims as he seeks to put immigration at the center of his White House bid. Senator JD Vance of Ohio, Mr. Trump’s running mate, has also spread the debunked theories, saying on Sunday that he was willing “to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention.”

In her interview, Ms. Harris laid out the city’s distress, pointing to children who could not attend school and law enforcement officers who had been stretched thin. She said residents had enjoyed “productive” lives before people began “spewing lies that are grounded in tropes that are age-old.”

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