Former President Donald Trump weighed in, late Wednesday, on reports that Vice President Kamala Harris will finally visit the United States-Mexico border, traveling to El Paso, Texas, with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas this week, just days before Trump was set to visit the border.
In a statement emailed from his Save America organization, Trump boasted that Harris would never have visited the border if he and other Republicans had not planned a similar trip.
Fmr. Pres. Trump responds to VP Harris’ border trip announcement: pic.twitter.com/jZT6PUa7YR
— Jennifer Franco (@jennfranconews) June 23, 2021
“After months of ignoring the crisis at the Southern Border, it is great that we got Kamala Harris to finally go and see the tremendous destruction and death they’ve created — a direct result of Biden ending my very tough but fair Border policies,” the former president crowed.
“Harris and Biden were given the strongest Border in American history,” he continued. “And now, it is by far the worst in American history.”
“If Governor Abbott and I weren’t going there next week, she would have never gone!” he said.
Trump’s call-out of Texas governor Greg Abbott references his planned trip to review Abbott’s plan to build his own border barrier, allowing Texas law enforcement officials to assist Customs and Border Protection with immigration interdiction. Abbott announced last week that he plans to put up “barriers” that are Texas government property, allowing the state to bypass restrictions preventing Texas officials from intercepting illegal immigrants. If migrants scale Texas’ border barriers, they can then be arrested for tampering with state property.
The move is designed to help curb the record-setting illegal alien apprehensions at the border and assist what Abbott believes to be an overwhelmed Customs and Border Protection Agency (CBP). Last month alone, there were 180,034 apprehensions at the border, the most in nearly 20 years.
Although Trump regularly attacks the Biden administration using his Save America email list — statements which are often posted to social media sites that have banned the former president, amplifying his message — mainstream media outlets do appear to agree that Harris’s decision to finally pay a visit to the United States’ southern border, three months after being placed in charge of the Biden administration’s border crisis, was motivated by Trump’s decision to travel there himself.
Forbes noted that Kamala Harris was visiting the border “ahead of Trump” in its headline. Others, like Newsweek, noted that Harris previously suggested that she favored communication with Northern Triangle countries like El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, over what she claimed was a “grand gesture” that detracted from her work addressing the “root causes” of the migration crisis, and pledged, instead, to visit the border “at some point” — a plan that put her at odds with reporters during her Central American tour earlier in June.
“If we are going to deal with the problems at the border, we have to deal with the problems that cause people to go to the border. To flee to the border. And that is the root cause,” Harris said during an interaction with the press on June 10th.
President Joe Biden, as The Daily Wire has previously noted, rolled back a number of Trump-era immigration restrictions, including the so-called “Remain in Mexico” policy — a move that many Republicans have suggested contributed to the sharp rise in apprehensions on the southern border.