Former US Secretary of State John Kerry has said, “Trump was right,” during an interview in which he criticized the Democrats for missing the issue of immigration for years.
Kerry, who was the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004 while a US senator from Massachusetts, accused his party of allowing the US-Mexico border to be “under siege” during Joe Biden’s presidency.
He said that it had given Republicans like Donald Trump a political advantage in a BBC interview.
“The first thing any president should say - or anybody in public life - is without a border protected, you don't have a nation,” Kerry said. “I wish President Biden had been heard more often saying, I'm going to enforce the law.”
The border has become particularly important to Trump during his presidency and has played a key role in the MAGA platform in 2024. Many Democrats have advocated for more relaxed immigration laws and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented migrants, criticising Trump’s position as discriminatory.
“Trump was right,” the former climate envoy said. “The problem is we all should have been right.”
Illegal crossings at the US-Mexico border have dropped to near-record lows in the first six months of Trump’s second term in office. However, the downward trend began during the last year of Biden’s presidency.
In June, Trump directed federal immigration officials to prioritize deportations from Democratic-run cities, a move that comes after large protests erupted in Los Angeles and other major cities against the administration’s immigration policies.
Trump in a social media posting called on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials “to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.”
He added that to reach the goal, officials ”must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside.”
Trump’s declaration comes after weeks of increased enforcement, and after Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and main architect of Trump’s immigration policies, said ICE officers would target at least 3,000 arrests a day, up from about 650 a day during the first five months of Trump’s second term.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
