I was not shocked by Donald Trump’s inclusion of my daughter Mia Ayliffe-Chung and her friend Tom Jackson’s deaths in his list of under-reported terror attacks. After all, attempts have already been made by the rightwing Australian politician Pauline Hanson and others to use their deaths as a means of preventing Muslim immigrants from entering Australia. However, I was affronted by the inclusion of their killings in Trump’s list, since it was at best a crass and callous error.

Our children’s deaths were ugly, brutal, and must have been utterly terrifying, and I find my mind attempting to recreate those events on a regular basis. This is a hurtful process, but I think it’s something I need to go through out of my love for Mia. And one day I am going to find the strength to visit the place where she died and meet Daniel Richards, the man who sat with her, risking his own life through those long hours of her death, and held her hand to soothe her while she died in his arms.

If I can find the strength to do this, surely some White House minion with a list to compile could take the trouble to get the facts right: Mia and Tom’s deaths were not committed out of some misguided interpretation of the Qur’an.

When I went out to Australia to retrieve my daughter’s body, I met Chris Porter who had accompanied Mia to the Home Hill hostel. He pointed out that Smail Ayad, the French national who has been charged with Mia’s murder, had not prayed in all the time they worked together in the cane fields around Townsville with my daughter and other people from the hostel. How could he be an Islamic fundamentalist if he did not respect the second of the five pillars of Islam? Ayad’s name suggests Islamic roots (he was of Algerian heritage) but that’s where the connection with Islam ends.

Mia was my only child, and what a gift of a child she was – a joyful creature who could light up a room with her smile. Arguably, that’s why she attracted the attention of her killer. He was apparently infatuated with her, but this is not necessarily the full story. According to press reports, Ayad had threatened to massacre his fellow backpackers even before Mia arrived.

I know that I will probably never receive answers to the questions I keep asking myself: why did these threats not trigger alarm bells with the staff at the hostel? Why was my girl placed in a dormitory with a potential killer, who had been “acting strangely” in the weeks and months up to her arrival? I can only guess that nobody cared enough to protect her.

Their backbreaking labour consisted of picking up rocks and stones before the harvester reached them, and Mia told me she felt the need to work fast to escape injury from the farm machinery. She also told me that she had already encountered a dead snake by day two.

I asked her if she’d had any induction into what to do in the event of a live encounter – knowing that snakes were a notorious hazard in the cane fields of Queensland – and she said no, she had no idea how she should act. From then on I was on red alert waiting for her calls: I knew this was no cultural exchange, and felt instinctively from the tone of her voice that she was panicky, and that her life was in danger.

My daughter was a migrant worker, and like migrant workers the world over she was treated as a disposable commodity. As a British parent of a delightful girl just out of school, with all the love of life in her eyes and a future of joy-filled love and laughter before her, this is difficult to bear. But it is a fact of life.

So Trump is right: there is a connection between my daughter and those travellers he wants to strip of their humanity and dignity in airports around the United States. But it’s not the connection he would wish to make. The connection is that my girl’s life was also held in scant regard by a harsh and unforgiving system that doesn’t value basic human rights.