Trump called the family of Jocelyn Nungaray, the girl murdered in Texas, before the debate

Minutes before the first presidential debate began, during which Donald Trump lashed out at immigration for an hour and a half, the Republican picked up the phone to make a call. He contacted the mother of Jocelyn Nungaray, the 12-year-old girl killed in Texas allegedly by two undocumented immigrants, which has become the former president’s latest attempt to justify why it would be convenient to reinforce restrictive policies on the southern border and begin the largest deportation in the history of the United States. “I’m about to participate in a debate,” Trump told Alexis Nungaray, who was “in a position of responsibility.”shock” after the call. He also assured her that “there was no one I would rather have spoken to before the debate than her.”

This is how he told New York Post Victoria Galvan, a friend of the mother of the girl whose murder has served as a pretext for Trump to criminalize illegal immigration, and about whom he has spoken on his social networks, in some of his latest speeches, and even in the presidential debate last Thursday. Trump “offered his condolences and told her that he would get back in touch with her,” said Galvan, who was with Nungaray when she received the call that lasted about ten minutes.

“He wanted to say that he was praying for Alexis, that he had been thinking about her and that he wanted to reach out to her,” Galvan recalled. “He said he would get back to her in a couple of days… I mean, she was really… we were all in shock.” Alexis and Glavan then talked about how “incredulous” Jocelyn would have been to know the attention the former president has paid to her case.

Two young undocumented Venezuelans were charged with Jocelyn’s death on June 17, an incident that the prosecutor in the case has described as “a sexual assault.” According to authorities, Johan José Martínez-Rangel, 22, and Franklin Peña, 26, drove the girl to a bridge where they tied her up, removed her pants, strangled her, and then dumped her body in a stream. After the incident that shocked the Hispanic community, Trump blamed Biden, criticizing his inefficient immigration policies. “We have a new massacre of migrants at the hands of Biden. It’s only going to get worse and it will all be the fault of corrupt Joe Biden,” the Republican said on Truth Social. “These monsters should never have been in our country and if I were president they would not have been in our country.”

Speaking to New York PostChristine Nuñez, a cousin of Jocelyn’s grandmother, acknowledged that while she was previously concerned about anti-immigrant policies in the United States, after the girl’s murder she has changed her mind. “I used to feel bad for immigrants, but since this happened it has made me change my mind about who should be allowed in and who should not be,” she said outside the funeral at Earthman Resthaven Cemetery. “I can’t say that all of them are bad, there are good people, but they need to close the border and not let everyone in, and look at each one individually.”

Migration on the table of the presidential debate

During the first presidential debate, where the leading candidates for the 2024 presidency faced off in front of an audience of 47.9 million people, Trump said he had spoken to Jocelyn’s family. “They are killing our citizens at a level that we have never seen before,” the Republican said during his speech.

In addition to other areas of interest for these elections such as inflation, abortion, employment or taxes, migration was one of the main topics of debate, as expected. However, many believe that, beyond blaming each other, neither of the two candidates showed any special interest in putting on the table a solution for the 10.5 million undocumented people living in the United States.

Biden accused Trump of separating “babies from their mothers” and putting them in cages during his time as president, and noted that after the change in his immigration laws, 40% fewer people are crossing the border illegally right now. “I’m going to continue to move forward with what we can do with more Border Patrol and more asylum officers,” he said.

Trump, for his part, accused his opponent of letting in millions of undocumented immigrants from “prisons and mental institutions to destroy the country” who, according to him, are committing most of the crimes in the United States, when studies say the opposite. “We are living in a rat’s nest right now,” said the former president, who also said that migrants were living in “luxury hotels” in large cities, when his veterans were on the streets. “They are killing our people in New York and California and in all the states of the union because we no longer have borders,” he said. “We call it immigrant crime. I call it Biden’s immigrant crime.”