President Biden said Sunday he’s going to approach the migrant surge at the southern border his way and he doesn’t care about critiques from his predecessor, dismissing him as “the other guy.”
Returning from a Delaware weekend, Mr. Biden reacted to reports that former President Donald Trump will visit the U.S.-Mexico border to highlight the crisis.
“We are putting in place a plan that I feel very confident about, and I don’t care what the other guy does,” Mr. Biden said.
Last week, Mr. Biden said the border surge “happens every year” and he put Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of attempting to persuade Mexico and Central American countries to do more to stop the influx of people heading to the United States.
The president rejected the migrants’ own statements that they’re coming because they expect more lenient treatment under his tenure, saying “I guess I should be flattered,” but insisted the real reasons they’re coming now are because it’s the easiest season to travel, and because of suddenly rougher conditions back home.
But Mr. Trump, who made border security his signature issue, told Fox News the situation is tough to ignore. He said officials from U.S. Customs and Border Protection asked him to visit so he might follow through sometime “over the next couple of weeks.
“Thousands and thousands of people are coming up right now as we speak,” Mr. Trump told Fox News. “And you’re going to have millions of people pouring into our country and it’s going to destroy our country. I don’t know what they’re doing and they don’t know what they’re doing. It’s a very, very dangerous situation. I’d love not to be involved. Somebody else is supposed to be doing it.”
Pressed by Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro on whether he would visit the border before Mr. Biden, Mr. Trump said he was not trying to compete with the current president.
“Well, I’m not looking to have a race, I’m looking to get a problem solved,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Trump painted a sinister portrait of the type of migrant wave, akin to rhetoric he used during his successful 2016 campaign.
“We have — you have potentially millions of people coming up over a fairly short period of time and these are people that in a large way are not people that we want in our country. You have criminals coming up, you have murderers, rapists, drug dealers coming up,” he said.
• Stephen Dinan and Tom Howell Jr. contributed to this report.
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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