Nikki Haley First ’24 GOP Candidate to Plan Southern Border Visit

Former United Nations ambassador and Republican 2024 presidential candidate Nikki Haley is scheduled to be the first in the field to visit the southern border, a spokesman for her campaign told the Daily Caller on Tuesday.

Haley will visit border locations between San Antonio and Eagle Pass, Texas, with Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-Texas, on April 3.

“Joe Biden caused the crisis at our southern border with his terrible policies, and then ignored it for two years; leaders show up,” Haley’s campaign spokesman Ken Farnaso told the Daily Caller. “That’s why Nikki Haley is going to the border.”

Former President Donald Trump and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy have joined Haley as officially declared GOP candidates for 2024.

During a Monday town hall forum in Dover, New Hampshire, Haley outlined her plan to deal with the crisis at the border and the record number of illegal migrants coming across the international line, the Daily Caller reported.

According to the report, Haley’s plan would mandate the E-Verify system nationwide that checks potential workers for their citizenship status, hiring 25,000 new border patrol agents, and prohibiting “sanctuary states,” where illegal migrants can go to as a safe haven from federal immigration laws, from using taxpayer money to fund safety net programs for them.

She also previously told the Daily Caller she wants to label the drug cartels operating at the border as “terrorist organizations.”

Trump previously visited the border in June 2021 with Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott.

“We have an open, really dangerous border,” Trump at a news conference at the Department of Public Safety’s Weslaco headquarters, the Texas Tribune reported. “We better go back fast.”

Abbott, who was up for reelection in 2022, declared a state of emergency at the border and allocated $250 million at the time to finish sections of the border wall that Trump started, but Biden ended this when he took office in January 2021.

“You look at this border, and you [know] what you see? You see an unfinished border,” Abbott said at the time. “This is Biden’s fault because President Biden is not continuing what President Trump began. President Biden needs to start right there and finish building the border wall.”

More than 1.2 million illegal migrants have crossed the border so far in fiscal year 2023, starting Oct. 1, 2022, including 212,266 in February alone, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.