Former President Donald Trump visited the United States-Mexico border with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday to address the ongoing illegal immigrant crisis, blaming President Joe Biden’s administration for the situation at the border and saying the U.S. is “sick.”
“We have a sick country in many ways. It’s sick in elections and it’s sick on the border,” Trump said. “And if you don’t have good elections and if you don’t have a strong border, you don’t have a country.”
“[Does the Biden administration] 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 said early on in the press conference.
Gov. Abbott said Vice President Kamala Harris is “misleading” Americans with her assertion that resolving the “root causes” in Northern Triangle countries will fix the problems at the U.S.-Mexico border. The Texas governor noted that illegal immigrants are pouring in from “more than 150 countries across the entire globe.”
“[The Biden administration is] missing the point,” he added. “There’s one place to solve problems on the southern border and that is on the border.”
Trump concluded the briefing with a jab at VP Harris, saying, “We’re going to a real part of the border with real problems, not a part where you look around and you don’t see any,” referencing Harris’ trip to El Paso last week.
Earlier this month, Trump announced that he had accepted an official invitation from Gov. Abbott to visit the “decimated” southern border, writing in a statement to American Military News that his administration had left Biden with the “strongest safest, and most secure border in U.S history,” but Biden’s leadership has since turned it into an “unmitigated disaster zone.”
Trump slammed the current administration’s handling of the border, accusing both Biden and Harris of handing “control of our border over to cartels, criminals, and coyotes. Drug dealers, MS-13 gang members, human smugglers, sex traffickers, and the criminal elements of the world now have free reign.”
Trump said the U.S. went from “detain-and-remove” to “catch-and-release” in a matter of weeks, in addition to “having border security that was the envy of the world to a lawless border that is now pitied around the world.”
“Hospitals and schools are getting crushed and public health is being sacrificed all in service of a radical left anti-borders agenda,” he wrote. “Our brave border agents and courageous ICE officers have been illegally stopped from doing their jobs. Our Nation is now one giant sanctuary city where even dangerous criminals are being cut loose and set free inside the U.S interior on a daily basis.”
Trump went on to slam both Biden and Harris, who at the time of his statement, hadn’t visited the U.S.-Mexico border. One week after the former president’s criticism and scheduled border visit, Vice President and Border Czar Kamala Harris announced she would be traveling to El Paso, Texas, for the first time since being selected by President Biden to lead border efforts almost three months ago.
