“Biden is destroying our country. And it all started with a fake election,” Trump said as he stood at the border, an American flag raised through a crane waving over him. Trump has persisted in falsely claiming he won in November, even though federal and state election officials, his own attorney general and many judges said there is no evidence of the grand voter fraud he alleges.
Coming out of his first rally since leaving the White House, the scale in underscored how Republicans, both nationally and majestically, continue to accept Trump as their party leader and showed once again how much the GOP has taken the immigration factor, Trump’s. signature, as the party seeks to regain Congress in next year’s midterm elections.
Trump invited South Texas through the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, who is running for re-election next year and is considered a possible presidential candidate for 2024. After being criticized for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, Abbott took over Trump’s immigration mantle, promising to continue construction of the southern border wall that the Biden administration has suspended.
On the wall, Abbott praised Trump and hailed him as “the guy who has done more to protect the border than any other president. “
Abbott pointed to the unfinished border wall that was emerging and called on Biden to resume construction. “It’s Biden’s fault because President Biden isn’t pursuing what President Trump started,” he said. Democrats have long criticized the wall as a symbolic waste of cash that does. nothing to address the root causes of migration.
Trump faced unprecedented new legal pressures in New York. On Thursday, its corporate and long-time monetary executive is expected to be charged with tax crimes as a result of a wide-ranging investigation into the business dealings of the former president, others close to him. told The Associated Press.
Trump did not respond to shouting questions about the tariff shutdown or the fatal Capitol uprising on Jan. 6, when his supporters stormed the building in an attempt to save him from democrat Joe Biden’s certification of victory in the 2020 election.
While Biden enjoyed the highest approval ratings in the first few months of his presidency, immigration has been a weak point. A vote by the May Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that more than a portion of Americans, 54%, disapprove of his handling of And a recent Quinnipiac University vote of the Texas electorate found that 64% disapprove of Biden’s handling of the border stage; Approved 29%.
Trump has hit the factor house in nearly every single appearance since leaving office and on Wednesday attacked Biden’s management for repealing policies he had adopted.
“All they had to do was leave him alone,” he lamented.
Along with the two dozen House members, who skipped a vote in Washington on creating a new panel to investigate the occasions on Jan. 6, Trump joined in Texas through an organization of former administration officials, adding his acting secretary of homeland security and acting Commissioner of U. S. Customs and Border Protection. U. S. His presence, along with Trump’s family complaints, gave the occasion the impression of a setback in time for the former president.
“We have a country in poor health in many ways. He’s in poor election health and he’s bad at the border,” he said while winning a border security briefing in Weslaco. He then insisted that if he were still president, the wall would have been completed in two months, even though there were more than two hundred miles left to build under contracts that had now been canceled.
“It would have been painted, not there, rotting and rusting. That would have been perfect. All set,” he said.
U. S. Customs and Border ProtectionU. S. It recorded more than 180,000 encounters on the border with Mexico in May, the highest number since March 2000, prompting Republican attacks. These numbers have been expanded through a pandemic-related ban on legal asylum that has encouraged migrants to make repeated attempts. , since getting stuck has no legal consequences.
Nearly 19,000 unaccompanied youth were recovered along the border in March 2021, throughout the month recorded. While the number of families and youth traveling without their parents has declined dramatically since March and April, encounters with single adults have remained high.
Biden’s administration has abandoned many of Trump’s tough policies, adding one that forced asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for hearings in U. S. immigration court. Biden said he is running to build a “humane” asylum system, though the main points are vague.
Last week, Vice President Kamala Harris, whom Biden asked to lead her administration’s response to the emerging number of migrants, traveled to Texas under mounting pressure from Republicans and some members of her party to the border. Trump took credit for forcing his hand.
In recent weeks, Abbott has deployed unprecedented plans and rhetoric on immigration in Texas, promised to continue building Trump’s wall on his own and announced his goal of moving $250 million from the state to a new barrier and funding more through crowdsourcing. Gov. Doug Ducey, also a Republican, also called on governors to send more resources for law enforcement at the border. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, two other possible candidates for the Republican White House in 2024, are among those who have pledged.
However, Abbott’s characterization of the Texas border as a developing emergency is being questioned by local government in the most populous counties along the border, Hidalgo added.
Counties have rejected Abbott’s efforts to use the existing number of border crossings as justification for issuing sweeping crisis reports, which are reserved for hurricanes and fires, but other Texas counties, located thousands of miles from the border and controlled by Republicans, have signed on, adding Galveston County, which said Tuesday it was willing to give more than $6 million in a federal stimulus budget to help the governor to build a new border barrier.
———
Associated Press editors Paul Weber and Elliot Spagat contributed to the report.
24/7 Policy of the latest news and events.