MILWAUKEE — Former President Donald Trump loudly vowed to restore order to the U.S.-Mexico border as the U.S. was hit with historic numbers of illegal immigration under the Biden administration.
“At the heart of the Republican platform is our pledge to end this border nightmare and restore the integrity of the sacred and sovereign border of the United States of America from day one,” Trump declared.
Trump, 77, listed off a string of accomplishments at the border, including ending the so-called “catch and release” practice, cracking down on asylum fraud and highlighting the “Remain in Mexico” policy.
“In less than four years, I have handed this administration the strongest border in American history,” he lamented. “Under the Trump administration, illegal immigrants were immediately arrested and deported.”
“This administration has repealed every single one of the great policies that the Trump Administration put in place to close the border,” he added.
Border security has long been a key issue for Trump, who pledged to “build a wall” along the border during the 2016 campaign, but under Biden, illegal immigration has soared to record highs.
“We want people to come to our country,” Trump said, “but we want them to come to our country legally.”
Throughout his campaign, President Trump has repeatedly pledged to complete the border wall and end the border crisis, a well-known pledge he reiterated on Thursday.
“I will end the illegal immigration crisis by closing our border and finishing much of the wall we’ve already built,” the president said in his speech.
Since October of last year, there have been more than 1.82 million encounters at the southern border. According to the latest figures From U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Biden, 81, has blocked a string of Trump’s border measures since early in his presidency, but he appeared to begin changing his stance on the issue as polls began to show the border was becoming a pressing issue.
The sitting president blamed the 78-year-old Trump, who has publicly denounced the deal, for the failure of a Senate agreement on the border that collapsed earlier this year.
The former president previously told The Washington Post that he planned to rewrite the speech to make it more unifying in the wake of last Saturday’s assassination attempt on him.
The 45th president largely refrained from criticizing Biden directly, only saying his name twice, but he did not shy away from launching strong attacks on the border crisis.
“The biggest invasion in history is happening right here in this country. They’re coming from every part of the planet. Not just South America, but Africa, Asia, the Middle East,” he said. “They’re coming from everywhere and this administration is doing nothing to stop them.”
“They are coming from prisons and jails, psychiatric hospitals and mental institutions, and we have a level of terrorism we’ve never seen before,” he added.
Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention will be his first major public address since surviving an assassination attempt during a rally on Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania.
During the Republican National Convention, he was hit in the right ear, while wearing a white bandage, by a sniper’s bullet that killed his father, firefighter Corey Comperatore, and injured at least two others.
The suspect, Matthew Thomas Crooks, was shot and killed by a Secret Service sniper seconds after firing his gun.
