Donald Trump supporters came out for the former president in record 44.4C temperatures to attend his Arizona rally on Thursday with 11 hospitalised for heat exhaustion.

Trump returned to the campaign trail marking his first appearance in a battleground state since he was convicted in a hush money scandal. He used the rally to repeat his critiques of the case and conviction as politically motivated.

“Those appellate courts have to step up and straighten things out or we’re not going to have a country anymore,” Trump said at a Phoenix town hall organised by Turning Point, a conservative youth organisation.

Hordes of his supporters crammed inside a mega church, where bass for the pre-show and introductory music was turned up so high that it shook seats and media camera shots.

The Phoenix Police Department said that 11 people at the event were transported to hospital where they were treated for heat exhaustion.

Officials said an excessive heat warning was in effect for the area during the rally where many of Trump’s supporters were unable to get inside before it reached capacity. Phoenix set a new record high of 44.4C by mid-afternoon.

Trump’s conviction has infuriated his supporters, who have pumped tens of millions of dollars into his campaign in the immediate aftermath. Trump blames his conviction on President Joe Biden, though the case was brought by the locally elected district attorney in New York.

“What are they going to campaign on?” Juan Arredondo of Peoria, Arizona said of the Democrats as he waited to get inside Trump’s rally. “They can’t campaign on the border. They can’t campaign on the economy.”

Trump focused much of his hour-long speech and subsequent Q&A on the US-Mexico border, blaming a litany of problems – from inflation to the long-term health of social security – on illegal immigration, characterising Mr Biden’s policies “a deliberate demolition of our sovereignty and our borders.”

Trump is expected to appeal last month’s conviction on all 34 charges in his New York hush money trial, in which he became the first former American president to be convicted of felony crimes.

He responded defiantly to the verdict against him a day after a New York jury found him guilty last week of a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor but had not spoken directly to the swing-state voters who will decide the November election until Thursday, when he used a profanity to decry the “fake” and politically motivated case against him.

Mr Biden won Arizona in 2020 by about 10,000 votes. It was, along with Georgia, one of two states decided by less than half a percentage point and is expected to be close again this year.

Ahead of Trump’s visit, Mr Biden’s allies in Arizona blamed the former president for overturning the national constitutional right to an abortion and defeating a bipartisan border security bill.

Despite the state’s importance on the presidential map, Trump has not campaigned in Arizona since 2022, when he held a rally to support his slate of midterm candidates, all of whom ended up losing.