Eric Trump claims that his father, former President Donald Trump, didn’t have an issue with illegal immigration because he faced the issue head-on.
Eric Trump’s comments came after his father revealed he is preparing for a trip down to the southern border as the Biden administration grapples with soaring migration rates at the U.S.-Mexico border. President Biden does not have any immediate plans to visit the border himself.
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“My father had fixed this problem. Illegal immigration was not a problem anymore,” Eric Trump told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo on Sunday. “That’s the most humane form of immigration where you don’t have people making this dangerous trek, and it literally shows you what bad policy can do to the country that in 90 days, in less than 90 days, a system that was working and was perfect and that was fixed turned to absolute junk.”
On Saturday, the former president disclosed to the same network that he was going to head down to the border within the next couple of weeks, saying Border Patrol wanted him to come down.
“It’s a very, very dangerous situation. I’d love not to be involved. Somebody else is supposed to be doing it,” he said.
In February, Border Patrol encountered almost 100,000 people who attempted to cross the southern border to enter the United States illegally, including 10,000 children without parents and 20,000 families. Sixty percent of the families encountered last month were not returned to Mexico, according to federal data.
Earlier this week, a group of Republican and Democratic lawmakers took separate trips down to the border to look at the situation firsthand. Republicans focused their visit on border security, while Democrats sought to highlight the conditions migrant children were living in.
Several Democrats, including Biden, have blamed the surge at the border on the Trump administration. Biden said at a press conference earlier this month that Trump’s hardline immigration policies “did not help at all.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer defended Biden on his approach toward immigration, saying that it’s going to take time to solve the ongoing situation.
“Let me just say this, Joe Biden inherited a huge mess on immigration, and it’s not going to be cleaned up in a month,” Schumer said.
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Amid criticism of their handling the border situation, the Biden administration put in place a media blackout at the southern border, citing concerns over COVID-19. Despite the surge, the president has encouraged migrants not to come to the border at this time.
