By JILL COLVIN and ADRIANA GOMEZ LICON

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Donald Trump attempted Friday to turn a major celebratory event for Kamala Harris into an attack line related to one of her favorite topics, immigration.

Hours before the vice president’s scheduled appearance with superstar Beyoncé in Houston, Trump made his own stop in Texas and accused Harris of hobnobbing with “woke celebrities” but not with the families of those killed by migrants.

With the election 11 days away, Trump and Harris both took a detour from their travels to battleground states for brief forays into solidly Republican Texas. Neither believes the state is competitive, but they are using it as a backdrop to send a message about the issues they hope voters will have in mind when they cast their ballots . For Trump, it’s border security. For Harris, it’s the right to abortion.

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’re like a trash can that the rest of the world can dump people into that they don’t want,” Trump told supporters Friday in Austin. Trump continues to promote the unfounded idea that foreign governments are actively sending criminals to the United States.

Harris said the remark was “just another example of how he really demeans our country.”

“The President of the United States should be someone who elevates the discourse, speaks the best of us, and invests in the best of ourselves, not someone like Donald Trump, who constantly belittles and belittles the people American,” Harris told reporters in Houston.

Throughout the campaign, Trump regularly appeared with grieving relatives of people injured or killed by people living in the country illegally. On Friday, he handed over the microphone to the mother of a 12-year-old Texan girl, Jocelyn Nungaray, whose body was found in June. Prosecutors illegally charged two Venezuelan men in the United States with capital murder.

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

At a rally Thursday in Arizona, Trump criticized Harris for the Biden administration’s record at the border, which he said had “unleashed” an “army of migrant gangs” that are “waging a campaign of violence and of 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 a lot of cities that haven’t been infected yet.” » Trump has long echoed tropes on immigration by describing migrants as carriers of disease, dating back to the COVID-19 pandemic.