Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday called for his immigration policies to be reinstated as he slammed President Biden’s response to the crisis at the border, saying, “I built a wall — Biden built a humanitarian catastrophe.”
“Our nation is being destroyed by Biden’s border crisis. The United States must immediately restore the entire set of border security and immigration enforcement measures we put into place — and critically, we must finish the wall,” Trump wrote in an op-ed published in the Washington Times.
“A nation without borders is not a nation at all. For the sake of our country, Joe Biden must finish sealing the border immediately, or the American People must elect a Congress that will,” the former president continued.
While listing all of his policies that Biden rolled back, Trump said those pertaining to the border were the most harmful.
“Of all the vindictive, shocking, and self-defeating border security actions Joe Biden has taken, none surpasses his decision to stop the final completion of the wall,” Trump said.
“By stopping construction, Joe Biden purposely and deliberately left gaps in the wall, creating unsealed channels right in the middle of the border to be exploited by human traffickers and drug smugglers,” he added.
Trump’s piece was published the same day he and a group of Republican lawmakers will visit the border in Texas.
Trump said he made good on his campaign promise to build a border wall, “all Joe Biden had to do was paint it.”
”Instead, Biden has enacted the most radical open borders agenda imaginable. This is perhaps the first time in world history a nation has purposely and systematically dismantled its own defenses to invite millions of foreign migrants to enter its territory and break its laws,” Trump wrote.
“To say that Biden has provoked a national security disaster does not even begin to do justice to the calamity.”
By ending catch-and-release, and negotiating agreements with Mexico and other countries, Trump said, his administration “achieved an incredible 90% reduction in illegal crossings.”
But he said Biden’s actions on the border have reversed those gains, noting that illegal border crossings were up nearly 700 percent from last year.
“Joe Biden has restored catch-and-release, torn up our hard-earned asylum agreements with Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, and announced that anyone on the planet who lives in a crime-afflicted area now qualifies for asylum in the United States,” he continued.
“Meanwhile, ICE is effectively shut down, senior border security officials have been fired, and criminals are being released in record numbers.
Trump said “walls work,” pointing out that after construction of his border wall, illegal border crossings fell by 90 percent in the Yuma area and 80 percent in the Rio Grande Valley.
“As a result of Biden’s abdication of his sworn duties, Texas now says they will ‘build the wall.’ This should not be necessary and is at best a band-aid over the gaping wound Biden created,” Trump said.
He said his administration laid the groundwork for building the wall by acquiring the land, getting the construction funds from Congress, securing the contracts, and designing and testing the barrier.
It would take years for Texas to repeat that process, he said, and called for federal intervention.
“Governors and state legislatures should certainly do what they can — but there is no substitute for federal action,” Trump said.
