The president used a high-dollar fundraiser here to call attention to a situation that he said has been ignored in the media: the plight of migrants who cross illegally into the United States and then die of thirst or hunger.
“This never comes out in the fake news,” Trump said as he recounted the stories about migrants that about a dozen donors told him privately at his first stop in a visit to Texas that will take him to Houston later in the day. At Trump’s urging, several of the donors described finding the bodies of migrants — including pregnant women and children — in the vast brush of their property.
Several of the donors also told of how afraid they have felt when migrants from Central America, dressed in black, turned up at their homes.
“Dangerous people are coming here and the good people are dying,” Trump said, adding that the donors had all told him that the answer to the problem was to build his wall along the border with Mexico.
The issue of immigration and border security has been at the center of Trump’s political life for years. Fifteen days before the 2018 midterm elections, he held a rally in Texas to deliver dire warnings about immigration that helped Ted Cruz, the embattled Republican senator, win his campaign for a second term.
In the five months since he barnstormed the country declaring that an “invasion” of dangerous migrants was imminent, Trump has intensified his focus on immigration. He and his strategists believe that no issue better fires up his core supporters and proves that he has kept his campaign promises.
Trump will not be alone in discussing the importance of immigration and America’s role in confronting the plight of displaced people.
Julián Castro, the former housing secretary under President Barack Obama and now a Democratic presidential candidate, will host a rally Wednesday in San Antonio, his hometown, that will focus on immigration, setting up a split screen in this border state that underscores the issue’s potency for 2020.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.