Mexico’s leftist President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) has urged Hispanics to reject Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in the upcoming U.S. presidential election, accusing the Republican candidate of allegedly weaponizing the issue of illegal immigration to win votes.

Addressing a government press conference on Thursday, AMLO accused DeSantis, who announced his presidential campaign on Wednesday, of “playing politics” with the lives of those who enter the United States illegally.

“All of his playing politics with migrants was because he wanted to be the Republican party candidate,” AMLO said. “I hope the Hispanics of Florida wake up and don’t give him a single vote.”

He also urged Hispanics not to support “those who persecute migrants, for those who don’t respect migrants, because a migrant – as it says in the Bible – deserves respect.”

AMLO also claimed that DeSantis and Republican Party politicians are “very hypocritical,” on the grounds that many of them employ illegal migrants to benefit from cheap wages. He also condemned those who want to close the U.S.-Mexico border to prevent the ongoing flow of narcotics that continue to destroy lives and generally wreak havoc across the country.

“(DeSantis) also came out with the same thing, about fentanyl, thinking that he’d get votes with it,” AMLO declared. “Let him start to see, because fentanyl is arriving via Florida (which does not border on Mexico) and we have to be informing people so that they don’t offend Mexico, so that they learn to respect us.”

During his conversation with Twitter CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday evening, which was plagued by technical issues, DeSantis pledged to follow through on Donald Trump’s promise to construct a border wal along the U.S.-Mexico border.

He similarly denounced the “absolutely insane system” where people “just show up at the southern border” and “get a sheet of paper,” before being released into the U.S. pending a court date.

“We will move on day one by declaring a national emergency,” he vowed. “We will construct a border wall. We will make sure we have Remain in Mexico and that we’re not entertaining those claims in that way.”

DeSantis also addressed the “need to hold the Mexican drug cartels accountable,” accusing them of weaponizing illegal immigration for their own ends.

“The cartels have been responsible for moving massive amounts of fentanyl into this country and that’s killing tens of thousands of Americans every year now,” he explained. “What they’re doing is they lace the other types of drugs with the fentanyl.”

AMLO, meanwhile, is known to have a relatively warm relationship with Donald Trump despite their ideological differences. Last month, he criticized charges brought by New York prosecutors against the former president, describing them as a “degradation of due respect for the law.”

“I don’t agree with what they are doing to former President Trump,” he told a news conference. I do not know if crimes were committed, it’s not my place. “Legal and judicial issues should not be used for political, electoral purposes. One shouldn’t make up crimes to affect adversaries.”

It is not the first time a Mexican president has weighed in on a presidential campaign. In 2016, former President Vicente Fox responded to Trump’s talk of Mexico paying for the border wall by telling the journalist Jorge Ramos: “I’m not going to pay for that f***ing wall,” he said at the time. “This nation is going to fail if it goes into the hands of a crazy guy.”