Trump visits Texas to record Rogan’s podcast

By JILL COLVIN and ADRIANA GOMEZ LICON

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Donald Trump tried to turn a major party event for Kamala Harris on Friday into a line of attack tied to one of his favorite topics: immigration.

Hours before the vice president was scheduled to appear in Houston with superstar Beyoncé, Trump made his own stop in Texas and accused Harris of associating with “woke celebrities” but not the families of people killed by migrants.

With 11 days left until the election, Trump and Harris both took a detour from their travels in the battleground states for quick trips to solidly Republican Texas. Neither believes the state is competitive, but they use it as a backdrop to deliver a message about the issues they hope voters will have in mind when they vote. For Trump, that is border security. For Harris, it’s abortion rights.

Trump’s trip to Texas, his second stop in a border state in two days, comes as the former president escalates his already dark and apocalyptic rhetoric against illegal immigration.

“We are like a dumpster for the rest of the world to dump the people they don’t want,” Trump told his supporters in Austin on Friday. Trump has continued to promote the baseless idea that foreign governments are actively sending criminals to the US

Harris said the comment is “just an example of how he really belittles our country.”

“The President of the United States should be someone who elevates the discourse and talks about the best of who we are, and invests in the best of who we are, not someone like Donald Trump, who constantly demeans and belittles who the American people are. Harris told reporters in Houston.

Throughout the campaign, Trump has routinely appeared with grieving relatives of people injured or killed by people living in the country illegally. On Friday, he gave up the microphone to the mother of a 12-year-old Texas girl, Jocelyn Nungaray, whose body was found in June. Prosecutors have charged two Venezuelan men in the US illegally with capital murder.

“She was just a child, and because of the Biden-Harris policies we have here … she’s not here anymore,” Alexis Nungaray said.

At a rally Thursday in Arizona, Trump blasted Harris for the Biden administration’s record on the border, which he said had “unleashed” an “army of migrant gangs” waging “a campaign of violence and terror against our citizens ‘.

At an event in Las Vegas later in the day, Trump claimed that cities had been “invaded and conquered” by violent immigrants, adding: “We have many cities that are not yet infected.” Trump has long repeated tropes about immigration by portraying migrants as disease carriers, dating back to the COVID-19 pandemic.