On Wednesday, Trump will return to Texas to raise money and sharpen his anti-immigration message for his own White House re-election campaign next year.
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. The issue is certain to be at the center of the president’s case for a second term in the Oval Office.
In the last several days, Trump has forced out Kirstjen Nielsen, his Homeland Security secretary, and several other top immigration officials for being too timid about shutting down the border and changing asylum rules to deny entry to migrants seeking protection in the United States. A top administration official said Tuesday that the staffing changes were designed to make way for more aggressive immigration actions.
As he arrives in San Antonio and Houston on Wednesday for a series of fundraisers and round tables with supporters, 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 in his hometown, San Antonio, that will focus on immigration, setting up a split screen in this border state that underscores the issue’s potency for 2020. Castro’s rally is expected to feature English and Spanish speakers and is being billed by his campaign as an opportunity for San Antonio, with its significant, long-standing Mexican-American population, to show its resistance to Trump and his border ideology.
It is not clear whether the president will acknowledge Castro or the Democratic rally, which is scheduled to take place after Trump has already traveled from San Antonio to Houston on Wednesday evening. The president has sometimes chosen to ignore critiques from candidates he deems not to be a political threat.
But if he does talk about that rally, Trump could provide an early example of how the immigration debate will play out on the 2020 campaign trail.
Trump is betting that the dark and threatening rhetoric — which worked in 2016 and appeared to work in some places, like Texas, in 2018 — will be just as effective in his re-election campaign. In a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in March, Trump accused Democrats of abandoning the mainstream on immigration, adding: “But that’s going to be good for us in 2020. They’re embracing open borders.”
But Trump does face challenges of his own. His promises on immigration from the 2016 campaign have mostly gone unfulfilled. He has largely failed to build the “big beautiful wall” along the southern border as he promised. And the recent surge of migrant families from Central America is a vivid demonstration of his inability to stop what he has called an “invasion.”
There was also significant evidence during the 2018 midterm elections that the president’s immigration attacks backfired in some Republican districts around the country. For example, several House Republicans, including some of the party’s leadership in Congress, complained to Trump that his announcement right before the election that he was considering an executive order to end birthright citizenship may have cost several moderate Republicans their seats.
And as he sets out for the re-election campaign, Trump is certain to face several challengers among the Democrats who are determined to make the president’s immigration agenda a key part of their reason for running.
Castro, the only Latino in the ever-expanding Democratic presidential race and the grandson of a Mexican immigrant, has seized on immigration as a central issue in his fledgling campaign. Last week, he became the first candidate to unveil a detailed immigration plan that aims to roll back the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policies. Included in Castro’s immigration platform are proposals to decriminalize unauthorized border crossings; provide a pathway to citizenship for immigrants in the country without permission; and split the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in half and reassign enforcement duties to other agencies.
Under his policy, Castro also called to establish a so-called Marshall Plan for Central America to aid countries that have a high number of migrants, including by increasing funding for economic development and violence-prevention programs.
With his immigration proposals, Castro, who has also served as mayor of San Antonio, is trying to position himself in the race for his party’s nomination as the candidate who can best combat Trump’s contentious border policies.
Supporters of Castro say his background, including his deep ties to this border state — his mother, Rosie Castro, is a civil rights activist who was among the leaders of the La Raza Unida political party — position him to address immigration issues. Some Democratic strategists also view his presence in the race, along with that of former the Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke, as instrumental not just in pushing immigration to the fore but also in mobilizing Latino voters in Texas and elsewhere.
“Texas is a Latino state, and we have two Texans on the ballot who are going to be turning out and galvanizing people from Texas,” said Mayra Macias, vice president of the Latino Victory Project. “But it’s also helping galvanize people, Latinos in particular, across the country because they are seeing these candidates talk about issues that affect us.”
The dual candidacies of Castro and O’Rourke are almost certain to place Texas squarely at the center of the increasingly heated immigration debate. But if immigration is at once a key campaign issue in Texas, and other states including California and Arizona, Republicans are betting that Trump’s anti-immigrant message will also resonate far from the southern border.
It was only two months ago that O’Rourke provided his own counterpoint to Trump’s border exhortations, with a rally in the border city of El Paso that coincided with one held by the president. “We are not safe because of walls but in spite of walls,” O’Rourke told supporters even as Trump was pressing to “finish the wall.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.