June 22 (UPI) — President Donald Trump was set to give remarks Friday afternoon about families with loved ones killed by undocumented immigrants as Congress considers legislation to reform U.S. immigration policies.
He’s scheduled to make remarks at 2:30 p.m. EDT at the White House.
“We must maintain a Strong Southern Border,” Trump said in a tweet Friday. “We cannot allow our country to be overrun by illegal immigrants as the Democrats tell their phony stories of sadness and grief, hoping it will help them in the elections. Obama and others had the same pictures, and did nothing about it!”
Trump has more than once invoked the name of Kate Steinle — a 32-year-old woman who died in 2015 after being shot by an immigrant previously deported — to push his immigration policies. The man who shot Steinle, Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, was acquitted of her death. His lawyers argued he found a gun on the ground and accidentally fired it, killing the woman.
Democrats “want to have illegal immigrants; in many cases, people that we don’t want in our country. They want to have illegal immigrants pouring into our country, bringing with them crime, tremendous amounts of crime,” Trump said in December.
In 2016, state and federal correctional facilities had 1.3 million prisoners, of which 83,556 or 6 percent, were non-citizens, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Census data show 13.5 percent of the U.S. population in 2016 were immigrants.
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