During his visit to the U.S.-Mexico border on Wednesday, Donald Trump criticized President Joe Biden for neglecting national security by dismantle border controls.
“We had all these big policies in place and they were all ended. This didn’t happen in three or five months, it happened in the first week. It was almost like they finished them because I made them“said the former president in a meeting with the governor of the state of Texas, Greg Abbott.
He stressed that his administration did “a titanic job”, and noted that instead the US currently has “an open and really dangerous border“.” We have a sick country. He’s sick at the elections and he’s sick at the border, “he added, pick up The Washington Post.
In addition, the Republican noted that the decision of his Democratic successor to undo his hard-line immigration policies had led to an increase in illegal immigration and drug smuggling. “Biden is destroying our country“he declared, giving a speech in front of an unfinished section of the border wall, informs Reuters.
The ex-president defended his management of the border area while he was in the White House and claimed that the wall he repeatedly promised to build along the 3,000-kilometer border with Mexico was months away from being completed when he left office, which is false. During the Trump administration, approximately 720 kilometers of the wall were built.
“Within a few months they would have had the wall fully finished and they were going to paint it “, he claimed. “They were supposed to paint the wall. They’re not even doing it. They have to give the wall a coat of paint. Believe it or not, it rusts. Maybe that’s what they like: letting it rust, let it rust. rot, “he added.
“Everything could have been completed,” he lamented. “It would have been painted, it wouldn’t be there, rotting and rusting. It would have been perfect,” he concluded.
Migration crisis
Trump’s remarks come as arrests at the southwest border have risen to monthly levels highest in two decades since Biden took office, according to preliminary data obtained by Reuters.
So far in fiscal year 2021, U.S. authorities have conducted more than a million migrant arrests on the border with Mexico. At the current rate, total detentions at the border when the fiscal year ends in September would be the highest since 2000, when nearly 1.7 million migrants were detained.
Since taking office in January, Biden has reversed many of Trump’s restrictive immigration policies: stopped the construction of the border wall and ended the program that forced tens of thousands of migrants to wait in Mexico while their asylum cases were resolved in the United States.
The visit to the border of Kamala Harris
Trump’s visit to the border area came after US Vice President Kamala Harris visited El Paso last week.
The senior official explained that on this site they saw “the disastrous effects“of the policy of separation of migrant families that Trump implemented during his administration, as well as the consequences of the deportation of undocumented persons to Mexico, in reference to the defunct Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) program, through which thousands of people were sent to the neighboring country to await the resolution of their asylum requests.
On the causes of migration, Harris acknowledged that these trips take place in a context of “lack of economic opportunities, violence, corruption” and “food insecurity” in the Latin American region.
