Former President Donald Trump traveled to McAllen, Texas on Wednesday to survey part of his border wall that has yet to be completed after Joe Biden stopped construction.
The former president said the migrant surge is ‘more dangerous than ever’ as he slammed Biden for not finishing his wall.
‘All Biden had to do was go to the beach,’ he said, claiming that if the president did nothing regarding immigration policies put in place by the Trump administration, the border crisis would not have sparked.
Trump also went on a tirade urging Biden to paint completed portions of the border wall, claiming that since construction and funding stopped, the wall has been left to rust.
On Wednesday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott welcomed former U.S. President Donald Trump (pictured) to the U.S.-Mexico, where Trump continued to blame President Joe Biden for the surge in migrants crossing the barrier this year
The former president visited McAllen, Texas, which is where a massive amount of crossings occur in the Rio Grande Valley. His location is 800 miles from where Vice President Kamala Harris went in El Paso on Friday
‘They have to get a paint job on the wall,’ Trump lamented. ‘And the best color to paint it is black.’
Trump said the entire southern border wall would have been completed within two months if he was reelected and ‘not sitting there and rusting.’
He arrived in a partly cloudy McAllen, Texas on Wednesday to survey part of his border wall upon the invitation of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a fellow Republican. Throughout his day in Texas, Trump was met with a few sputtering of summer showers.
The former president spoke alongside Abbott with the backdrop of a part of the border wall that ends, creating a large gap before the next part starts up again.
‘We had it down to a science,’ Trump said of his administration’s immigration policies, boasting ‘there has never been a border so secure.’
‘It’s a disgrace,’ he added, of the influx of border crossers under Biden.
“There has never been a border so secure as the southern border that we had, and now it’s opened up,” Trump (pictured) said in a briefing with Abbott
Trump addressed about 100 members of the media and another few hundred in an exclusive crowd that made up law enforcement officers, Texas lawmakers, Trump insiders and members of the U.S. Congress who traveled down to the border for the former president’s trip.
Lawmakers attending included freshman Representatives Madison Cawthorn, the youngest member of Congress and close Trump ally, and Lauren Boebert, who is staunchly pro-Second Amendment and has quickly become a voice on the right against illegal immigration.
Before Trump arrived in McAllen for his mini rally, Cawthorn lit up a cigar and Boebert approached the media risers where she yelled: ‘I have a question for the press, do you miss President Trump?’, which was met with silence.
Cawthorn also juxtaposed Trump’s visit to McAllen, Texas with Vice President Kamala Harris’ visit to El Paso on Friday, claiming that she avoided facing the true crisis.
Since January, CBP has reported nearly 930,000 illegal immigrant encounters at the southern border, with more than 180,000 migrants being encountered in May
‘A leader doesn’t cower from crisis and hide thousands of miles from misery,’ the North Carolina Republican told DailyMail.com. ‘The current administration chooses photo ops over productive policymaking.’
Harris went to El Paso on Friday, finally caving to pressure to visit the southern border in her capacity as ‘border czar.’ She was criticized, however, for not going to where the majority of crossings take place in the Rio Grande Valley, where Trump went on Wednesday.
In a briefing in nearby Weslaco ahead of visiting a portion of the wall, the former president took the opportunity to rail against voter fraud, lash out at the media, blame Biden for the massive influx of illegal migration and praise his own immigration policies.
‘We have a sick country in many ways. It’s sick in elections and it’s sick in the border,’ Trump said.
Trump gave kudos to Abbott and other Texas officials gathered for the briefing for helping secure the southern border.
He also gave a shout-out to his former White House doctor, Ronny Jackson, who now represents Texas in Congress.
Vice President Kamala Harris visited the southern border in El Paso, Texas with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (far left) on Friday
‘And there’s my doctor right over there, my doctor,’ Trump said. ‘He said, ‘You know sir, if you want, you’re really smart, you ought to take the cognitive test,” Trump recalled. ‘But he did a test. Did I ace it? I aced it,’ the ex-president continued, adding ‘I’d like to see Biden’ take it.
Trump added that the first few questions are identifying animals.
‘He’s gonna have a little hard time,’ Trump said of Biden. ‘I think he’s going to have a hard time with the first few, actually.’
The Democratic National Committee blamed Trump for the prevailing crisis and called his visit ‘political theatre’ and a ‘clown show’.
‘Donald Trump and Republicans are bringing their clown show on the road in a desperate attempt to try to spin their cruel border policies to mislead voters,’ DNC Rapid Response Director Ammar Moussa released in a statement.
‘For four years, Republicans were silent as Trump sabotaged our immigration system and threw it into chaos,’ he continued. ‘If Republicans were serious about addressing issues at the border, they’d join President Biden and Democrats in working to clean up the mess they left behind, create a safe and humane immigration system, and finally pass immigration reform. Anything less is political theatre.’