Former President Donald Trump, speaking to a gathering of law enforcement officials in Weslaco, Texas, before heading out for a border wall tour with Gov. Greg Abbott Wednesday, insisted that border security and fair elections are the two keys to having a strong country.
If you don't have good elections, if you don't have a strong border, you don't have a country," Trump said at the roundtable after outlining the numerous problems that have occurred along the U.S.-Mexico border after he left office and President Joe Biden took over.
Praising the gathered officials for coming in and "still doing a great job," Trump said the border has gone from being the "best border we've ever had in the history of our country...the best ever by far."
But now, the border is not safe and the Biden administration and congressional Democrats have launched a "disinformation campaign" to blame the Trump White House and Republicans, and even law enforcement officers like the ones at the roundtable, said the former president.
"So now they're saying, 'Oh, we got a problem, so let's blame the sheriffs, let's blame the governors. let's blame everybody else' but them," he said. "They're also saying we would defund the police. They came out with a term to fund the police....it's like Russia, Russia, Russia, everyone said. Russia, Russia, Russia, I said. What's that all about? Then they said all you were very friendly. Well, that's been proven to be false, not only false. It was them that were associated with Russia."
Trump also said that the import of fentanyl and the crimes in human trafficking were almost stopped under him, and that almost 500 miles of wall went up, despite years of lawsuits where "they sued us for everything, and we won."
Trump also criticized Biden for ending the "the remain in Mexico" policy for asylum seekers and restarting the catch-and-release program, both of which he blamed for a surge of record numbers of illegal immigrants entering the U.S.
"The real question, do they really want open borders or are they incompetent?" he said. "There's only two things you're either incompetent. Or for some reason, you have a screw loose and you want to have open borders."
The problem with having open borders is that other countries are "opening their jails; they 're opening up their prisons" to let people out and to allow them to head to the United States.
"They do it very slowly, because they don't want people to know this, but I know it. And they're letting all of their murderers, rapists, drug dealers, the human traffickers out, and they're coming into the United States of America at a level like we've never seen," said Trump. "They weren't coming in with us."
Trump also discussed what his plans had been for the wall, noting that it would d have been hard to climb and that the plans were "100%" on track with the Border Patrol and all others involved
"We designed a wall that was terrific," he said. "You know, you see it as steel, but it's not really steel on the outside. It's hardened concrete on the inside of the bollards. And then it's also rebar and it's a very heavy rebar, and a very powerful rebar, very strong rebar steel, so we had steel, concrete and steel...they've got to really want to get through and we've had almost no instances of that."
He also spoke out about the nation's elections, saying that they must get "straightened out" because if that doesn't happen, "we can have a third world country here pretty soon because our elections are a mess.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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