Former President Donald Trump visited Texas on Sunday, near the US-Mexico border, as he escalates his anti-immigrant rhetoric and campaigns on hardline immigration policy proposals.
During the visit, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination received the endorsement of Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
“We need Donald J. Trump back as our president of the United States of America,” the Republican governor said at an event with the former president in Edinburg, Texas.
Speaking to a small crowd at the South Texas International Airport, Trump bashed President Joe Biden over his handling of the border, arguing that the US now has “the most insecure border in the history, I think, of the world”.
The former president has ramped up his rhetoric on the campaign trail, promising to carry out the “largest interior deportation operation in American history” if he wins the White House next year. He has said that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”, in comments that echo white supremacist rhetoric, and has compared migrants coming to the US to the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter.
“This has never happened before. Our country is being invaded. This is an invasion,” Trump, who has made curbing illegal immigration a cornerstone of his 2024 campaign, told a recent rally in Hialeah, Florida.
If elected to a second term, Trump plans a broad expansion of his administration’s hardline immigration policies that would restrict both legal and illegal immigration. The plans include rounding up undocumented immigrants already in the US and placing them in detention centres to await deportation. Such a proposal would require the construction of large camps to house migrants awaiting deportation, and the use of federal and local law enforcement to assist in the arrest of undocumented immigrants across the country.
“Stopping the invasion at our southern border is an urgent national security imperative and one of President Trump’s top priorities. That’s why – in his own speeches and in Agenda 47 – he has laid out by far the most detailed program to secure the border, stop illegal immigration, and remove those who should never have been allowed into our country in the first place,” a Trump campaign spokesperson said in a statement to CNN.
Biden campaign officials slammed the policy last week, calling it “un-American”.
“Simply put, Donald Trump is out to get immigrants, our rights, our security and our democracy. And that’s really what’s on the ballot next year,” said Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez.
