Former President Donald Trump during a visit to El Paso on Wednesday afternoon said the US is ‘sick in the border’ and ‘sick in elections’. The 45th president also blamed the Biden administration and Democrats for a ‘disinformation campaign’ on the border crisis and other matters.
‘We have a sick country in many ways,’ Trump said during a border security briefing at the Weslaco Department of Public Safety headquarters with Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
‘It’s sick in elections and it’s sick in the border.’
Trump joined Abbott as a special guest to tour part of the unfinished border wall in the Rio Grande Valley.
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‘The border has never been this way,’ Trump said. ‘It went from the best border we’ve ever had – not in 20 years, you know they like to say in over a 22-year period – no it’s the best border ever by far.’
Trump accused the Democrats of blaming Republicans officials including some at the briefing for the surge in migration since he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden and left the White House. The ex-president said it took his administration two-and-a-half years to build nearly 500 miles of border wall due to lawsuits.
‘We were sued by everybody and largely by the Democrats in Congress by the way and now by the disinformation campaign. They’re saying the unsafe border is your fault. Can you believe this?’ Trump said.
‘Because they’re getting killed, now they’re saying oh, we’ve got a problem. So let’s blame the sheriffs, let’s blame the governors, let’s blame everyone else but them.’
During the briefing, Abbott said Vice President Kamala Harris, who visited El Paso on Friday, ‘is misleading America’ by addressing the border through a focus on the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
‘The fact of the matter is there are people coming to the US that are coming from more than 150 countries across the globe,’ Abbott said. ‘There are still more than 147 other countries we’ve got to solve.’
Abbott said his state is ‘building our own border wall to keep Texas safe’ and that he is making sure an arrest program is in place instead of catching and releasing migrants.
‘This is not going to be the red carpet treatment that the Biden administration has rolled out,’ Abbott said. ‘This is going to be time in jail.’
Abbott earlier this month said he would allocate $250million in taxpayer money to continue building the border wall, which was Trump’s biggest 2016 campaign promise and was not completed.
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