Former president and longtime race baiter Donald Trump made waves over the weekend when he suggested in a Fox News interview that officials had requested his presence at the increasingly chaotic southern U.S. border. “Well a lot of people want me to [go], the Border Patrol and the people of ICE want me there and have asked me to go,” Trump told Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro. “I feel I sort of owe it to them.”
Trump set what advocates described as a new mark for cruelty at the border by separating families from their children and instituting a “Return to Mexico” policy that left migrants vulnerable and exposed. Now that a so-called surge of migrants, including children, has threatened to overwhelm U.S. officials in the early days of the Biden administration, Trump appears determined to capitalize on it.
But if the ex-president enjoying lingering support among the rank-and-file of CBP and ICE is more than plausible, at least one of the agencies tasked with enforcing U.S. immigration law distanced itself from any visit.
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“There is no official ICE personnel communications that went out,” Paige Hughes, spokesperson for ICE , told The Daily Beast, adding that she could not speak for what individuals or their union representatives might have done.
