(The Center Square) – Former President Donald Trump on Thursday said the border crisis is a “a Joe Biden invasion. This is a Biden invasion.”
He met with Gov. Greg Abbott in Eagle Pass, Texas, to tour a new military base established through Abbott’s border security mission, Operation Lone Star. “What they showed me is nothing less than incredible. This is a military operation. This is like a war,” he said.
The 80-acre complex will hold up to 2,300 troops in a base camp overseeing border operations for the state’s 1,254 shared miles of border with Mexico.
Trump called President Biden, who was visiting Texas at the same time in Brownsville, “crooked” and “a terrible president, the worst president our country has ever had and probably the most incompetent president we’ve ever had.”
He said Biden policies were facilitating illegal entry of “thousands and thousands of people from China, Iran, Yemen, the Congo, Syria and a lot of other nations that are not very friendly to us” who are primarily military age men.
Trump said the total number of illegal entries could reach to between 15 million and 18 million under Biden’s first term. Since January 2021, an estimated 11 million people have illegally entered the country including gotaways, The Center Square has reported, the highest in U.S. history.
Trump also cited examples of violent crimes committed by criminal aliens pointing to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement data, which The Center Square has extensively reported. They include 33,000 assaults, 3,000 robberies, 6,900 burglaries, 7,500 weapons charges, 4,300 sex crimes, 1,600 kidnappings and 1,700 homicides, he said. Those committing the crimes “are coming from jails … from mental institutions and … from insane asylums,” he said, and “the blood of countless innocent victims” is on the president’s hands.
He also touted his own policies as successful: ending the Obama policy of catch and release, building 571 miles of border wall, and purchasing materials for another 200 miles, implementing the Remain in Mexico policy and public health authority Title 42, enforcing rapid removals and safe third country agreement asylum bans, and having 28,000 Mexican soldiers “take care of our border with the safest border in the history of our country.”
Abbott said, “Today is a day of an extraordinary contrasts. We have President Trump back in the state of Texas literally on the border itself” and President Biden in Brownsville in “a sanitized area” nowhere near the razor wire barriers Texas erected in the area.
He also said that Biden announcing he was going to Brownsville after Trump announced he was going to Eagle Pass “just goes to show that Biden does not care about either Texas or the border.”
The border crisis was created by President Biden after he ended four Trump policies, Abbott said, which “led to the lowest illegal border crossings in about four decades.” They include ending catch and release, Title 42, Remain in Mexico, and building the border wall.
“All Joe Biden had to do to secure the border was to keep in place what President Trump put in place,” Abbott said, but instead he signed executive orders eliminating them. Biden “did something even worse,” he continued, when he “lied to America” saying he needed Congress to pass laws in order to secure the border. “There are three laws that Congress has already passed that are on the books right now that Biden could and should enforce.”
The first law requires the Biden administration to deny illegal entry into the United States, referring to the Immigration and Nationality Act. “He’s not denying illegal entry,” Abbott said. “President Biden is aiding and abetting illegal entry.”
The second law requires mandatory detention of everyone who illegally enters the U.S. Biden “is not detaining them,” Abbott said, “he’s releasing them across the entire country.”
“The third law that Congress already has on the books” requires the administration to build border barriers “like what Texas has built, like what President Trump built. Biden not only is not building any [barriers], Biden is using every tool that he can to tear down the [barriers] that Texas is putting up in our state.”
“Because what Biden is doing has endangered our country,” Abbott said, Texas invoked the self-defense clause of the U.S. Constitution “to defend ourselves.”
This includes Texas building its own border wall, installing marine barriers in the Rio Grande River, erected concertina wire and other barriers, the Texas National Guard blocking illegal entry, and Texas Department of Public Safety officers arresting illegal foreign nationals on state crimes. The policies have been implemented from El Paso to Brownsville.
“On the night Joe Biden lifted Title 42, Brownsville was Ground Zero” for illegal entry, he said, with thousands coming through a day. After Texas National Guard built concertina wire and other barriers to block illegal entry, the number dropped to 14, he said. “That’s because the Texas National Guard has wired it shut.”
Abbott also pushed back against Biden claiming the House needed to pass a Senate border deal in order to secure the border. The president “has the power … already to enforce the laws of the United States of America.”
