Beto O'Rourke, the former congressman who garnered a national following during his unsuccessful challenge to Sen. Ted Cruz last year, is staging a counter event to President Donald Trump's rally in El Paso, Texas, Monday night, setting up a high-profile face-off as the Democrat nears a decision on a 2020 presidential campaign .

The president is holding his first campaign rally of the year in downtown El Paso, about a mile from the southern border with Mexico, to again make his case that Congress provide funding for a wall as a Friday deadline approaches to avoid another partial government shutdown.

About 2 miles east, O'Rourke, a former El Paso city councilman, is staging an event at a high school where he's promising to present "a powerful, positive message for the country about who we are on the U.S.-Mexico border" with a "march for truth" that will bring between 6,000 and 9,000 people just blocks from the coliseum where Trump will be speaking.

"The proximity is important because we need to send a message," said Linda Rivas, one of the organizers of the march. "We had to be close to the rally, we had to show them who we are."

O'Rourke's decision to bracket Trump in his hometown is the latest and most dramatic signal yet that he's on the cusp of entering the race for the White House. He's said he'll make a decision by the end of February. But the dueling appearances creates a televised split-screen that will elevate the 46-year-old O'Rourke as a credible opponent to the sitting president.

During a conference call before the rallies, O'Rourke said he sought to combat Trump's attempt to use his city as a prop.

"We are the example that the country needs right now," he said. "Our safety is a result of treating one another with respect, with dignity."

El Paso provides a natural setting for both men to make their cases about immigration, which is poised to remain a leading issue in Trump's re-election campaign.

In his State of the Union address last week, Trump held up El Paso as an example of how a wall can make a city safer. He falsely said that prior to constructing a barrier, it had one of the highest rates of violent crime in the country.

In fact, crime statistics show that from 2006 to 2011, a period that includes two years after the fence was built, the number of violent crimes in El Paso increased by 17 percent, according to The El Paso Times.

The city's Republican mayor, Dee Margo, has also countered Trump's claims, saying he's wrong to charge that El Paso was one of the country's most dangerous cities and that it was safe before the construction of the barrier.

O'Rourke is expected to act as a real-time fact checker of Trump's claims, standing outside the arena where Trump will rally thousands of supporters.

He's said that the 2006 law that authorized walls and fences pushed migration flows "to ever more treacherous stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border, resulting in thousands of deaths. But in a Medium post, he's also made a broader case against a wall, arguing it would lead to farmers losing property, fail to combat the legitimate challenge of illegal drug trafficking and "will not do a single thing to reduce the number of undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers coming to this country."

"The wall has not saved lives, it has ended lives," O'Rourke said on the call. "The wall has not made us safer, it's made us less safe."

O'Rourke does call for investments in "infrastructure, technology and personnel" at ports of entry around the country," as well as providing a path to citizenship for children who were brought by their parents unlawfully into the country. He would also provide a pathway to citizenship for the millions of residents in the country illegally, but has not outlined requirements they would need to fulfill to achieve that status.

O'Rourke will also present himself as a stark rhetorical contrast to Trump, who has often used incendiary language to describe those attempting to come to the U.S.

"No more 'invasions', 'animals', 'rapists and criminals', 'floods', 'crisis' — dehumanizing rhetoric leads to dehumanizing policies," O'Rourke wrote. "We cannot sacrifice our humanity in the name of security — or we risk losing both."

Last year, Trump took on O'Rourke directly during a rally for Cruz in Houston.

"Ted's opponent in this race is a stone-cold phony named Robert Francis O'Rourke, sometimes referred to as 'Beto,'" Trump said, mocking the Democrat's nickname. "He pretends to be a moderate, but he's actually a radical, open borders left-winger."

The political theater plays out as congressional negotiators continue to work on a deal to fund the government that the president will support. While even Republican lawmakers are desperate to avoid another shutdown, White House officials haven't ruled out that possibility.

The latest snag in a deal is over the number of immigrants who can be detained after being arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. During a meeting at the White House with a dozen sheriffs on Monday afternoon, Trump said Democrats "don't want to give us the beds."

"ICE is an incredible group of people," Trump said. "They're very disrespected by the Democrats."