WASHINGTON – President Trump said his administration is doing a “fantastic” job dealing with migrants at the border and blamed Democrats for blocking aid to address the humanitarian crisis.
“We are doing a fantastic job under the circumstances,” Trump said in an interview that aired on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday. “The Democrats aren’t even approving giving us money. Where is the money? You know what? The Democrats are holding up the humanitarian aid.”
Host Chuck Todd started the back-and-forth by pointing to news reports that said migrant children are living in squalid conditions.
“I want to ask what’s going down with these children in these migrant camps. The stories are horrible, Mr. President. You have children without their parents. You have kids taking care of kids,” Todd said. “Why aren’t you doing something?”
Trump first answered by blaming President Obama.
“And President Obama built the cages. Remember when they said that I built them?” Trump said. “It was 2014.”
He also credited Obama for starting the controversial family separation policy.
“What’s happened, though, are the cartels and all of these bad people, they’re using the kids. They’re, they’re, it’s almost like slavery,” the president continued.
He added that “bad people” know they have an advantage thanks to the U.S.’s asylum laws if they bring a child with them.
Todd said it looked like the children were being used as political pawns. “They could be impacted for years,” the NBC newsman insisted.
“If the Democrats would change the asylum laws and the loopholes, which they refuse to do because they think it’s good politics, everything would be solved immediately. But they refuse to do it. They refuse to do it,” Trump said. “You know what? If they change those, I say, I used to say 45 minutes. It’s 15 minutes. If they changed asylum and if they changed loopholes, everything on the border would be perfect.”
Trump has been trying to draw Democrats to the negotiation table in recent days by threatening large-scale deportation raids.
On Saturday he tweeted that he was delaying “the Illegal Immigration Removal Process (Deportation)” for two weeks in order to give Congressional Democrats and Republicans some time to work on asylum legislation.
“I want to give the Democrats every last chance to quickly negotiate simple changes to Asylum and Loopholes,” Trump tweeted Sunday morning. “This will fix the Southern Border, together with the help that Mexico is now giving us. Probably won’t happen, but worth a try. Two weeks and big Deportation begins!”
