Former President Trump criticized Vice President Harris’s recent trip to the U.S.-Mexico border at his first post-presidential rally on Saturday, claiming she made the trip because he announced he was visiting the area.
“Kamala Harris, your vice president, only went to the border yesterday for the one simple reason: that I announced that I was going,” Trump told a crowd in Wellington, Ohio.
“If I didn’t do that, I don’t know if she was ever going to go,” he added.
The White House has denied that Harris’s trip was a result of Republican criticism after the southern border saw a large influx of migrants — particularly unaccompanied minors — in the months that followed Biden’s inauguration.
“This administration does not take their cues from Republican criticism, nor from the former president of the United States of America,” top Harris aide Symone Sanders told reporters last week. “We have said, over a number of different occasions … that she would go to the border. She has been before. She would go again. She would go when it was appropriate, when it made sense.”
Harris took her first trip to the southern border in El Paso, Texas, on Friday, meeting with border agents and young migrants. She also homed in on the need to focus on the reason people are making the journey to the U.S. from Mexico and Central America.
“This has been a trip that also is connected with the obvious point: If you want to deal with a problem, you can’t just deal with the symptom of the problem; you’ve got to figure out what caused it to happen,” Harris told reporters during a press conference on Friday.
Biden announced earlier this year that Harris would lead the administration’s effort to stem the surge of migrants at the southern border from Northern Triangle countries.
She faced backlash from Republicans earlier this month when she laughed at a question from NBC’s Lester Holt while in Guatemala about why she had not visited the border, pointing out that she also had not gone to Europe.