Donald Trump heads to US-Mexico border to tour ‘unfinished border wall’
Former President Donald Trump is set to accompany Texas Governor Greg Abbott to the US’s southern border with Mexico on Wednesday, five days after Vice President Kamala Harris paid her own visit.
The Republicans are heading to El Paso, Texas, about two weeks after Abbott said Texas would use taxpayer money to pay for more border wall – Trump’s biggest campaign promise, which went uncompleted.
Trump and Abbott will go on a tour of the ‘unfinished border wall’ around 11.30am local time, according to the governor’s office. The two Republican fixtures will hold a border security briefing around 12pm at the at Weslaco Department of Public Safety Headquarters.
The former president heavily criticized Harris, whom President Joe Biden has deemed his ‘border czar’, for not visiting the boundary with Mexico. Trump unveiled his trip to El Paso with Abbott weeks ago. Then Harris suddenly announced she would go to El Paso on Friday, before Trump.
In his first post-presidential rally on Saturday in Wellington, Ohio, Trump claimed that Harris went to the border because he had announced his trip.
‘Kamala Harris, your vice president, only went to the border yesterday for the one simple reason: that I announced that I was going,’ Trump said during his rally. ‘If I didn’t do that, I don’t know if she was ever going to go.’
Harris during her visit on Friday met with young migrants and border agents. She said during her press conference that ‘this has been a trip that also is connected with the obvious point: If you want to deal with a problem, you can’t just deal with the symptom of the problem; you’ve got to figure out what caused it to happen’.
The White House has denied that the vice president went to the border in response to Republicans calling the border situation a crisis, amid a surge of migrants since Biden took office.
‘This administration does not take their cues from Republican criticism, nor from the former president of the United States of America,’ Harris’ top aide Symone Sanders said last week. ‘We have said, over a number of different occasions… that she would go to the border. She has been before. She would go again. She would go when it was appropriate, when it made sense.’
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