Vice President Kamala Harris will head down to El Paso, Texas, to visit the border on Friday in a trip that will come ahead of former President Donald Trump's own visit there next week.
President Joe Biden tasked the vice president to attend to the border crisis earlier this year, but she has yet to visit -- something that critics have crowed from the rooftops. Count former President Donald Trump among the critics.
When former President Trump heard the news, he slammed the vice president, releasing a statement claiming she is “ignoring” the crisis.
"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," he said.
On June 15, Trump announced his plan to visit the border on June 30 with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Now he is saying that Harris is only visiting the border because he was going to get there ahead of her. He also blamed the crisis at the border on the current administration, stating that he gave them “the strongest border in American history.”
"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
Trump went as far as to call the border "an unmitigated disaster zone” and that the U.S. went from having "border security that was the envy of the world" to a "lawless border" that is looked down on around the world.
There has been an influx of migrants attempting to cross the U.S. border in the last few months, something the Biden Administration has been criticized for.
Harris was asked by NBC News anchor Lester Holt and others whether or not she planned on visiting the border.
Harris laughed, answering, “I – at some point – you know – we are going to the border. We've been to the border.”
"So this whole – this whole – this whole thing about the border. We've been to the border. We've been to the border."
Holt reminded her that she had not been to the border herself, and she responded, laughing, with "I haven't been to Europe."
Harris is expected to be at the border on Friday, followed by Trump in the coming week. On Vice President Harris’s trip, she is expected to be accompanied by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
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