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Nikki Haley has lashed out at a “completely unhinged” Donald Trump and blamed him for chaos at the US’s southern border, saying he had deliberately scuttled bipartisan efforts in Congress to crack down on migration.
Speaking at a rally in the Houston suburb of Spring, Texas, Haley said Trump had allowed millions of migrants into the country during his presidency — and had blocked a recent congressional deal on the border so he could use migration as a weapon in the 2024 White House race.
“Donald Trump went and told them not to pass anything until after November because it would hurt him in the general election,” Haley told a crowd of supporters at the Sawyer Park Icehouse bar on Monday.
“We can’t wait one more day to secure that border. We’ve got to start now.”
Haley’s latest attack on Trump comes as she makes a last-ditch effort to secure votes ahead of Super Tuesday, when Texas will be among more than a dozen states holding votes in the Republican primary race.
The former governor of South Carolina has had little success in stopping Trump, who has won all the key early voting states in the Republican race. Haley’s first and only victory came at the weekend, when she won the primary in the District of Columbia.
Haley has sharpened her attacks on the former president in recent weeks, and her message on Monday in Texas was that Trump was soft on immigration and an obstacle to finding a solution.
US Senate Democrats and Republicans recently scrapped a bipartisan compromise deal that would have tightened controls at the border, in exchange for more US aid for Ukraine and other allies, after Trump signalled he did not want his colleagues in Congress to vote for it.
“If you look at that bill the good part of the bill was that it strengthened asylum laws,” Haley said. “We have to do that. Three million illegal immigrants came in under Trump because our asylum laws weren’t strong enough.”
Trump needed to “stay out of” the congressional process, she said.
Trump and President Joe Biden separately travelled to the border last Thursday, lashing out at each other in duelling speeches that underlined how immigration has become an election issue this year.
“This is a Joe Biden invasion,” Trump said on Thursday during a trip to the border city of Eagle Pass.
Biden spoke 200 miles away in the city of Brownsville, where he urged Republicans to come together and pass the bipartisan bill, which would increase staffing on the frontier, raise the threshold for those eligible for asylum and give the president powers to shut down the border.
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