'Cynical political move': Joe Biden slams Trump and GOP for blocking 'strongest' bipartisan border bill for election benefit
WASHINGTON, DC: President Joe Biden delivered a strong rebuke against former President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers, blaming them for his decision to take executive action to curb the influx of migrants at the southern US border.
In his remarks from the White House on Tuesday, June 4, the president announced a long-anticipated executive order to prevent illegal border crossing, according to The Hill.
Joe Biden says Donald Trump wanted to use illegal migration issue to 'attack' him
Biden shared that he is “moving past Republican obstruction” to announce the order which will take effect when the seven-day average of daily border crossings exceeds 2,500 between ports of entry, a threshold already met, leading the action to be implemented immediately.
“Frankly, I would have preferred to address this issue through bipartisan legislation, because that’s the only way to actually get the kind of system we have now that’s broken, fixed," said Biden.
"To hire more Border Patrol agents, more asylum officers, more judges. But, Republicans left me no choice,” he continued, criticizing the Republicans for blocking a bipartisan border bill in the Senate.
He described the bill as "the strongest border security agreement in decades” and placed the blame squarely on Trump.
“Republicans in Congress, not all, walked away from it. Why? Because Donald Trump told them to,” said Biden.
“He told the Republicans… that he didn’t want to fix the issue; he wanted to use it to attack me. That’s what he wanted to do. It was a cynical, extremely cynical political move," he said of Trump.
"And a complete disservice to the American people who are looking for us, not to weaponize the border but to fix it," the president added.
Why did Republicans block the bipartisan border bill?
Trump requested GOP lawmakers to block the deal to keep the border crisis as a major election issue.
In February, Speaker Mike Johnson blocked the deal calling it “dead on arrival,” and, in January, the former president admitted that he was fine with being blamed for the bill's future.
Joe Biden criticizes Donald Trump's deportation plans
On Tuesday, June 4, Biden also criticized Trump's deportation proposal, which references the Eisenhower administration's deportation plans through a program called 'Operation Wetback' that utilized military tactics for the removal of immigrants who illegally entered the US.
“I will never separate children from their families at the border, I will not ban people from this country because of their religious benefits, I will not use the US military to go into neighborhoods all across the country and pull millions of people out of their homes, away from their families and put them into detention camps…as my predecessor says he will do,” said Biden.
