South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, running for the Democrat presidential nomination, claims President Trump is purposefully causing a surge of illegal immigration at the United States-Mexico border to “benefit politically.”
In an interview with Axios on HBO, Buttigieg said he “wouldn’t put it past” Trump to cause a surge of illegal immigration at the southern border to use the issue in the 2020 presidential election, a conspiracy touted by a number of Democrat lawmakers.
Buttigieg said:
From the near-term part, which is horrible policies like family separation and also kind of thoughtlessly using U.S. troops as props on the border, to the big picture, which is that this would not be such a problem, if we had stability in Central American countries. And it turns out that immigration is more useful to this president as a crisis unsolved than it would be as an achievement if he actually fixed it. We could fix it. I mean there’s enough of a consensus among the American people and even in Washington about the terms of bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform and yet they still can’t deliver because the president needs this to be a problem for his domestic political purposes. [Emphasis added]
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The president needs this crisis to get worse, even though it makes a liar out of him. I don’t think he’s worried about that. He’s worried about the ability to— [Emphasis added]
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I don’t think he cares if it gets better, but he certainly doesn’t benefit from comprehensively fixing the problem. And I wouldn’t put it past him to allow it to become worse in order to have it be a more divisive issue, so that he could benefit politically. [Emphasis added] – read more