Former President Donald Trump joined Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott on the U.S.-Mexico border Wednesday to showcase the unfinished border wall and attack President Joe Biden’s policies they argue have led to the unprecedented surge of people crossing our southern border.
Trump talked a lot about the policies his administration put in place to not just deter the cartels from bringing people over, but also illegal things such as drugs.
Welcome to the Lone Star State, President Trump!
Join us LIVE for a briefing on how Texas is solving the ongoing crisis at our southern border.https://t.co/PHeo6aKOJT pic.twitter.com/kgBEReiUNc
— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) June 30, 2021
He said the numbers show his policies were working and Biden should not have reversed them and created this current crisis.
“We did a great job and within a period of a few months it was all dissipated,” Trump said. “Remain in Mexico, it was so important. Catch and release, we broke that one. Chain migration where people come in and then they bring everyone else in with them – we did a h*** of a job and we had it down to really a science.”
“It got to a point where people weren’t coming in unless they were getting in legally. The real question is, do they really want open borders or are they incompetent? There’s only two things. You’re either incompetent or for some reason you have a screw loose and you want to have open borders,” he added.
While the Trump administration built about 450 miles of new barriers along the southern border, Biden immediately halted construction after taking office, leaving gaps that rendered most of the border wall incomplete.
“Now we have an open, really dangerous, border,” Trump declared. “More dangerous than it’s ever been in the history of our country, and we better go back fast.”
Meanwhile, border states are dealing with an unprecedented surge of people coming across, leading many Republican lawmakers to call for the wall to be finished.
Gov. Abbott is trying to use federal COVID-19 relief funds to finish the border wall, which 50 percent of Texans support, but he’s facing opposition from Democrats in the state legislature.
Abbott said there’s an 800 percent increase in people coming across from May 2020 to May 2021. And he talked about how Texans are combating the current surge with plans to finish Trump’s wall with state funds.
“There’s one place to solve the issues at the border and that is on the border, and that is exactly where the Biden administration needs to devote the resources to get the job done,” Abbott noted.
He added, “We passed in our state budget that I just signed more than a billion dollars for Texas to have to step up and secure our border, and then after that they added an additional quarter billion dollars for Texas to begin building our own border wall to keep Texas safe.”
The governor said states like Florida, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Georgia are sending resources to help Texas combat the surge. He warned that if nothing is done, this will soon not just be Texas’ problem.
“We launched Operation Lone Star where we deployed 1,000 Texas public safety officers as well as Texas National Guard, and they have already arrested almost 1,800 people for criminal violations, in addition to about 40,000 apprehensions for people across the border illegally and they have busted 41 stash houses,” Abbott pointed out.
Trump’s visit to the southern border comes just days after Vice President Kamala Harris finally went to El Paso, roughly 100 days after Biden appointed her to lead his administration’s response to the migrant increase.
Her trip came after the culmination of months of criticism for not going to the border sooner. Harris indicated it wasn’t the pressure or criticism that ultimately prompted her to make a trip to the border. She said it was always “a part of the plan.”
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