Barely a week ago, former President Trump announced that he had accepted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s invitation to visit the Texas/Mexico border, a visit that is scheduled to take place on June 30th.
In the statement he issued at the time, Trump referenced the failures of the Biden administration to effectively deal with the border crisis, noting their undoing of Trump administration policies like “Remain in Mexico” had helped trigger the record surge in migrants trying to cross it. He took particular aim over the fact that neither of them would visit to see for themselves.
“If this weren’t bad enough,” he said, “Biden and Harris won’t even tour the scenes of the wreckage they created, or come down and visit with the Border Patrol and ICE heroes risking their lives to defend our Nation at a time when the White House is doing everything it can to make their job totally impossible.” He called their inaction a “willful dereliction of duty.”
It was a master troll effort designed to embarrass them over the fact that the former POTUS would be touring the area before the current President and Vice President, the latter of who is Biden’s point person on the border, would be.
But just today, in a tacit admission that Trump had forced their hand on the matter, Politico reported that at long last Vice President Kamala Harris will be making the trip later this week:
Vice President Kamala Harris is heading to the U.S.-Mexico border this week, amid an unrelenting chorus of criticism from Republicans over her failure to visit there.
Harris, who was tasked by President Joe Biden to lead diplomatic efforts to stem the flow of migrants arriving on the southern border, will make a stop in El Paso, Texas on Friday, according to sources familiar with the trip. She is expected to be accompanied by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Trump responded accordingly to the news by taking credit for the White House’s about-face:
NEW TRUMP statement: "After months of ignoring the crisis at the Southern Border, it is great that we got Kamala Harris to finally go and see the tremendous destruction and death that they've created—a direct result of Biden ending my very tough but fair Border policies…" pic.twitter.com/NxEEYvhpVO
— Henry Rodgers (@henryrodgersdc) June 23, 2021
The news of Harris’ visit to the border not only comes just a few days after Trump upstaged the administration on the crisis but also two weeks after her disastrous trip to the Northern Triangle to “address” the supposed “root causes” of the border crisis, a visit that was filled with repeated questions about when she was going to visit the border that she did not handle well at all.
Trump’s announcement last week came after Gov. Abbott told Fox News that his state planned on resuming construction of the Trump border wall that Biden put a stop to his first day in office.
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