Former President Donald Trump will visit the US-Mexico border next week along with about a dozen House Republicans, according to a Politico report on Wednesday, June 23.
The lawmakers are members of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), a conservative caucus in the House GOP that also met with Trump at his Bedminster club in New Jersey earlier this month, per Politico.
The upcoming border trip comes as Republicans have attacked the Biden administration for months over its handling of an uptick in migrants at the US-Mexico border.
“President Trump spent four years fixing the border. But the Biden administration broke it again, and we are now experiencing the worst border crisis in our history,” GOP Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana told Politico. “That’s why the RSC has made carrying on the Trump legacy on immigration our top priority this Congress and why we are heading to the border with President Trump to explain how we can end this national embarrassment.”
Trump announced last week that he accepted an invitation from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for an “official visit” to the southern border on June 30.
The former president made immigration and the creation of a “border wall” a central issue of his campaign and his administration. Since leaving office, he’s kept that rhetoric alive. The trip is another break from the modern precedent that former presidents step back from public life and don’t politically attack the current office holder, especially outside of an election year.
“The Biden Administration inherited from me the strongest, safest, and most secure border in U.S history and in mere weeks they turned it into the single worst border crisis in U.S history,” Trump said last Tuesday in a statement released through his leadership PAC, Save America. Details of the trip’s exact location have not yet been announced.
Trump’s ex-spokesperson Jason Miller previously teased in March that the former president was considering a trip to the border at some point, but was waiting for President Joe Biden to “fail on his own” first.
Many Republicans have blamed the rise in migrants at the border on Biden’s rollback of Trump-era immigration policies. Yet Biden has pushed back on the criticism, previously saying that the surge happens “every year” and pointing to factors like natural disasters, violence, and poverty as reasons behind it. He has warned prospective migrants not to come to the border as his administration works on reforming the US’ immigration policy.
Top GOP members have also blasted Vice President Kamala Harris for not personally taking a trip to the border, though she and the White House have responded that other administration officials have gone down on several occasions. Harris recently traveled to Mexico and Guatemala, where she met with leaders to discuss and address the underlying causes of migration.
Source: Business Insider
