Former president Donald Trump said his top priority if elected president would be closing the U.S. border with Mexico.
Trump made the comments in an interview with Tucker Carlson that aired Wednesday night on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, the same night that GOP candidates took the stage for the first debate of the presidential primaries. Trump, the Republican frontrunner by far according to The Center Square Voters' Voice Poll, decided to skip the debate because of his wide lead.
“If you’re elected president again, what’s your number one priority?” Carlson asked. “When you ran the last time, you ran on building the wall. This time your bottom-line top promise to the country.”
Trump said he’d focus on numerous things at the same time, but the border was the priority. Without hesitation, he said, “the border, and taking hundreds of thousands of criminals that have been allowed into our country and bringing them back to their country.”
Last month, people came in from 149 countries “from places many people have never heard of coming into our country," Trump said. "They are coming in from mental institutions, they are coming from prisons. They are emptying their prisons from all over South America. They are emptying out their mental institutions. Terrorists are pouring in and we have no idea [who they are].”
The former president said he "had the strongest border in the history of our country. I built almost 500 miles of wall. I had another 200 to build. We built it, all they had to do was install it,” he continued, referring to the Biden administration, which instead halted construction of the wall on President Joe Biden’s first day in office.
Trump made the pledge to secure the border after more than 8.6 million people illegally entered since January 2021.
