Trump blames Dems for border problems
SAN ANTONIO — President Donald Trump used the backdrop of a Texas fundraiser Wednesday to warn of the dangers and tragedy of migrants flowing across the Mexican border — an issue he predicted would play well for him in his 2020 re-election campaign.
With 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 here, 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.”
Castro, who served as housing secretary in the Obama administration, is uniquely positioned to take on Trump on the immigration issue. The grandson of a Mexican immigrant, he is the only Latino candidate in the race for the Democratic nomination. He planned to speak at a rally Wednesday night that was billed by his campaign as an opportunity for San Antonio, with its significant Mexican-American population, to show its resistance to Trump’s immigration policy.
The president’s decision to weigh in on the border was a clear signal that he did not intend to let the issue fade anytime 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 as he recounted the stories about migrants that about a dozen donors told him. 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.
The president said he had never heard such stories of migrants dying, even from his top immigration and border patrol officials. In fact, immigrant advocates have for years documented the grim fate of some migrants who grow sick and die trying to make it into the United States. The advocates say Trump’s policies have made the problem worse by limiting the number of migrants who can legally claim asylum at ports of entry, pushing more to cross at remote areas of the border.
Several of the donors also told of how afraid they had felt when migrants from Central America 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 the wall that has become the symbol of his approach to immigration.