Trump promises to “take control” of the border with Mexico and attacks migrants

Donald Trump assured from Texas that if he governs again, “he will make the job easier” for the authorities of that state to deport and arrest Latino migrants.

Former US President Donald Trump assured this Sunday from Texas that if he returns to the White House in 2024 he will “take control” of his country’s border with Mexico, while attacking migration.

Accompanied by Governor Greg Abbott, who supported his candidacy for the White House, Trump said that if he governs again “he will make the job easier” for the Texas authorities, whose territory borders Mexico, and where thousands of migrants usually enter mainly from Latin America.

“We are going to take control of the border and we are going to make sure we have the most secure border in history. Now we have the most insecure border in history,” Trump said during a visit to border agents in the city of Edinburg (south).

The Republican said that under Democrat Joe Biden’s government “gangs of thugs” were invading the United States.

In a recent presentation before Congress, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas acknowledged that, since Biden took office in 2021, there have been 6 million migrant interceptions.

“I think at the end of this administration there will be 15 million people (…) coming to our country illegally. And we don’t want a lot of these people in the country,” Trump added.

In recent weeks, the former president has stepped up his campaign rhetoric, warning that irregular migrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country and denouncing his political opponents as “vermin.”

Trump’s campaign has made it clear that if he returns to power, he will design a harsh repression against irregular migrants, with detention centers and mass deportations.

“To the hell”

His visit to Texas, where he has broad popular support, comes at a time when Abbott is preparing to promulgate a rule that will make the irregular entry of migrants into Texas a crime.

This law will give local authorities the power to detain them and even expel them to Mexican territory.

The Mexican Foreign Ministry recently expressed its “rejection of these anti-immigrant measures” that seek to stop the flow of people “through their criminalization, which will result in the separation of families, discrimination and racial profiling.”

If enacted, this rule “would easily rank among the most radically anti-immigrant bills ever passed by a legislature,” the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas has said.

Abbott also had a line of huge buoys installed in the middle of the year in a portion of the Rio Grande, the natural border between Texas and Mexico, to contain the advance of migrants.

As Trump said on Sunday, “the country is going to hell. We have people who don’t care, or they aren’t intelligent, or they hate the country (…). Who can oppose the wall?” on the border, whose construction he promotes together with Abbott.

He insisted that there are many “bad people” arriving in US territory, and that Americans who live near the border with Mexico “are afraid to go out, to walk” and that they want to sell their properties but there is no one to buy them. He assured that he will solve the problem.

As is usual in his speeches, Trump once again suggested that those who defeated him in 2020 did not do so legitimately, accusations for which he is already being prosecuted. “These people came here [to power]. I won’t say how, but you know how and everything exploded, not just the border,” he said.

While his future is decided in court, Trump continues his campaign with a view to the presidential elections in November 2024.

Two weeks ago he was in Houston, where he said he will “always take care of” Texas. This Sunday he criticized that the Biden administration is buying oil from Venezuela and, according to him, not from Texas, whose industry is the economic engine of the state and the country.

The former president and Abbott blame Biden for the immigration crisis that the United States is going through and accuse him of being flexible with the irregular entry of migrants.

For Biden, how he handles the issue of migration can influence his re-election goals.

On Friday, within the framework of the meeting of the leaders of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, he met with his Mexican counterpart, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and they addressed the issue.

Biden thanked López Obrador for his “cooperation” to confront the “historic levels of migration.”

The Mexican president called Biden a “good man” and said that he was “the first president of the United States in recent times who has not built walls.”

Source: Milenio