Former President Donald Trump Monday accused the Biden administration's policies on the border of "destroying the country" and leading to death and tragedy.
"We're bringing the violence to our country, because many of the people coming in are not non-violent people," Trump said in an interview with Fox News' Harris Faulkner. "They are violent people ... these countries don't send out their finest and in some cases, I'm sure you have wonderful, fine people, but you also have criminals, you have murderers, you have sex traffickers, you have a lot of very bad people coming into our country, and they are doing nothing about it."
The Biden administration announced on Sunday that it will let immigrants go free into the United States pending their court appearances, said Trump, and "it is crazy."
"They are destroying our country," he said. "This is just like with the vaccine where they say let's blame Trump. We had record positive numbers and frankly in another couple of weeks we could have finished up the wall. They ended construction and the only reason it didn't get finished (was because) it took me 2 1/2 years to win the 11 lawsuits that we had, many of them by the Democrats in Congress."
But in the parts of the nation where the border wall has gone up, "it has been incredible," said Trump, but there must be some entry points to allow workers to enter the country, he stressed.
"You have people coming in helping the farmers," he said. "They've been coming in for years. If we ever stopped that with our farmers, the farmers would go out of business in California, wine country, various other places. So you take them in. But what happens is you do have some open points because obviously, we have people coming back and forth. But you also have in some cases areas which weren't completed like gate areas and other areas which would have been completed very quickly. You could have had it done in a month."
But now, contractors whose jobs were cut off are going to want to be paid not to finish the job, and "it's a shame," said Trump. "We had unbelievable numbers and we will have numbers like nobody has had once the rest of the wall is closed up. It will be many, many times worse. It will only get worse."
Trump also pointed out that the Biden administration blaming him for the border situation is "just like" its comments on the coronavirus vaccine.
"They didn't produce anything," he said. "All they did is take our policy. Our policy was incredible. Operation Warp Speed was incredible. All they did was take our policy. They are saying they did the vaccine. They didn't do the vaccine. I did the vaccine by pushing the FDA (on approval.) It would have taken 5 years and they probably never would have had a vaccine and I got it done in 9 months."
Meanwhile, Trump has called on Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to resign, and he said Monday that the secretary is in "way over his head."
"All he had to do is sit down in his chair," said Trump. "The systems were taking care of themselves. We had great people there. A lot of those people were removed. The policies were removed. We had 'stay in Mexico' because what happened is hundreds of thousands of people were coming into our country. Our laws were so bad. We had to change and get things changed."
And as a result, he said, the numbers on the border were "so beautiful."
"Now it was just announced they are allowing everybody to walk through and just come in and they're not taking anything," said Trump. "They have no information about the people. That's the people they know about. How about the people they don't know about? All those thousands of people that are coming in where there is no protection? The Border Patrol, who are phenomenal, and ICE they are like babysitters right now. Mexico is no longer protecting us."
Trump said that he still thinks "we won the election, as far as I'm concerned" and said his administration was going to make the immigration requirements even more stringent "with the understanding that we want people to come into our country, but they have to come in legally. Very simple."
But, Trump said that "what we did was incredible."
"I do want to start off by saying they built the cages," said Trump. "They built cages in 2014 but that was during the Obama administration. And they blamed them on us. We didn't build the cages. They did. Very sad when they had a picture in The New York Times of children in cages and it turned out it was them."
Meanwhile, Trump said that when Obama was in office, the United States was paying Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, "approximately $500 million a year. Who knows what they were doing with the money. You can imagine. They were supposed to use that money for economic development and keep people there. It sounds good but it wasn't being used for that. People were flowing in."
Trump, though, said to "stop payment" because the countries wouldn't take back MS-13 gang members, and then the countries changed their stance.
"I got along very well with those three countries and really well with Mexico. The president of Mexico is a friend of mine, a great guy," said Trump.
But now, under Biden, Mexico is having a "field day."
"Why are we supposed to take care of the world?" he said. "In many cases the world's criminals, they're coming over not from the three countries plus Mexico. They're coming from Yemen, from the Middle East. Who the hell knows what we're taking in? These people are destroying our country. I said it was going to happen during the campaign. That's why I got 75 million votes. Probably much more than that."
But, Trump pointed out, when he took over, "it was a disaster. I built 500 miles of wall and now you have vast sections. You see some openings, but the openings get closed ... this is not a wall that should be torn down. This wall has made a tremendous difference of stopping sex traffickers, human traffickers, drug dealers, drugs."