With national polls indicating he is surging in the presidential race, former President Donald Trump announced plans to seize assets of criminal gangs and cartels to create a fund to help victims of migrant crimes if he returns to the White House.
Trump announced the plans during a Tuesday media event at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, which aired live on Newsmax.
"Today, I'm announcing that for the first time under my administration, we will be seizing the assets of the criminal gangs and drug cartels," Trump said to cheers from supporters. "And we will use those assets to create a compensation fund to provide restitution for the victims of migrant crime.
"The government will help in the restitution. But something has to be done and we're going to get it done."
Trump used the event to excoriate Vice President Kamala Harris for her failure to help secure the southern border – she was named President Joe Biden's border czar – and for her part in both the Biden administration's failed military withdrawal from Afghanistan and rising inflation.
The Republican presidential candidate was joined on stage by the mother of a child allegedly killed by an MS-13 migrant gang member, the owner of a struggling dry-cleaning business, and the mother-in-law of a soldier who died in Afghanistan. There also was a brief video showing the mother of a 12-year-old girl allegedly murdered by two illegal migrants.
Trump spoke for several minutes about the southern border, where cartels having transported fentanyl and trafficked children into the U.S., and criminal gang members have entered the country.
"My daughter is six feet in the ground based off of policies that she allowed to keep," Alexis Nungaray said in the video. "Kamala Harris did have one job, and she not only failed … not me, she failed my daughter. She failed Jocelyn, and she was only 12.
"President Trump reached out, gave me his sincerest condolences as not a former president, but just as a father, as someone who cares. I believe Donald Trump needs to be back in office. I can at least know that my next child will be safe in this country."
Tammy Nobles, whose 20-year-old autistic daughter was found raped, tied up and strangled to death in her home, was introduced by the former president.
"Homeland Security did not do their job," Nobles said. "Health and Human Services did not do their job. The Biden-Harris administration did not do their job. If they would have done their job, made that one phone call to El Salvador, my daughter would still be alive today."
Trump summed up Harris' role in the current administration by saying: "The full consequences of Kamala's four-year reign are almost too terrible to discuss or contemplate."