By JILL COLVIN and ADRIANA GOMEZ LICON

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

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

With 11 days until the election, Trump and Harris both detoured from their trips to battleground states for brief forays into solidly Republican Texas. Neither thinks the state is competitive, but they’re using it as a backdrop to send a message about the issues they hope voters will consider when they vote. For Trump, this 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 ramps up his already dark and doomsday rhetoric against illegal immigration.

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

Harris said the remark was “just another example of how he’s really bringing our country down.”

“The president of the United States should be someone who raises the bar and talks about the best of who we are and who invests in the best of who we are, not someone like Donald Trump who constantly belittles and degrades who he is the american people. Harris told reporters in Houston.

Throughout the campaign, Trump routinely appeared with grieving relatives of people who were injured or killed by people living in the country illegally. On Friday, he turned the microphone over 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 U.S. illegally with capital murder.

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

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

At an event in Las Vegas later that day, Trump claimed that cities had been “overrun and conquered” by violent immigrants, adding: “We have a lot of cities that haven’t been infected yet.” Trump has long echoed tropes about immigration, portraying migrants as carriers of disease, dating back to the COVID-19 pandemic.