Donald Trump announces plan to visit southern border as Kamala Harris faces mounting pressure to visit herself

United States Vice President Kamala Harris is currently facing mounting pressure to visit the US border with Mexico, with former President Donald Trump adding to it by announcing plans to visit the border in Texas later this month.

In a statement this week, Trump said that he will visit “our nation’s decimated southern border” on June 30 with Texas Governor Greg Abbott. “The Biden administration inherited from me the strongest, safest, and most secure border in US history and in mere weeks they turned it into the single worst border crisis in US history,” he said, referring to a rise in arrivals at the southern border. The announcement comes after Governor Abbott vowed to raise funds from donors around the world to build fresh barriers at the border between Texas and Mexico as a continuation of Trump’s efforts to construct a border wall.

During his presidency, Donald Trump saw hundreds of miles of border wall built between the United States and Mexico as part of a nationwide crackdown on illegal immigration. President Joe Biden, Trump’s successor, froze funding for construction of the border wall on his first day in office, with the White House calling on lawmakers to block future funding to the border wall development and redirect the money to other initiatives.

In a podcast interview released on Tuesday, Abbott said he would take contributions from anybody and “everybody in the entire world” to see more border wall constructed along the border in Texas. Abbott said he would be revealing more details on his plans later this week. Former Vice President Mike Pence recently joined a growing chorus of voices calling on Kamala Harris, who is the Biden administration’s “border czar,” to visit the southern border. “It’s time, Vice President Harris,” said Pence in a tweet on Friday. “It’s Time to Deal With the #BidenBorderCrisis!” In an NBC interview recently aired, when asked whether she would be visiting the border anytime soon, Harris said a trip would happen “at some point.”

“You know … we are going to the border. We have been to the border,” she said. When pressed on the fact that she had yet to make a visit to the border, despite her mandate to oversee the response to the rise in arrivals, she responded, “And I haven’t been to Europe. I don’t understand the point you’re making.” It is still unclear when Vice President Harris will make the trip or whether Trump will make it before she does. Instead, Harris appears to be more focused on addressing the root causes of migration, as she traveled to Guatemala and Mexico to discuss the effort to address irregular migration to the US, telling immigrants to “not come.”

ARTICLE: CHLOE CHANDLER
MANAGING EDITOR: CARSON CHOATE
PHOTO CREDITS: TIMES OF INDIA