With high-dollar donors standing behind him, Trump said migrants pouring across the border with Mexico were dying in great numbers while gang members arriving from Central America were marauding and threatening American ranchers. And he made clear that he was going to try to put the blame on Democrats.
“I think they’re going to pay a very big price in 2020,” Trump said, before heading to Houston for another fundraiser. “I think the border is going to be an incredible issue. And they’re on the wrong side. They want to have open borders.”
But Julián Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio and a Democratic candidate for president, fired back at Trump, accusing him of using such talk as a political tool to energize his voters with dark threats about immigrants.
“It was predictable that he would start beating the drum of this again as he gets closer to re-election,” Castro said in an interview. “What I’ve noticed is that anytime he gets into political hot water, he goes back to the issue of immigration to drum up support.”
The president signaled that he did not intend to let the issue fade any time soon. At the fundraiser, he told reporters that he wanted 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 doesn’t come out in the fake news,” Trump said. 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 had felt when migrants turned up at their homes. “Dangerous people are coming here and the good people are dying,” Trump said, adding the donors had all told him that the answer to the problem was to build the wall that has become the symbol of his approach to immigration.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.