President Donald Trump’s got some rare praise from the Senate’s most left-wing members on immigration policy last week.
“So long as we have nation-states, you’ve got to have borders,” Sanders said. “If you don’t have any borders, then you don’t have a nation.”
“Trump did a better job,” Sanders admitted. “I don’t like Trump, you know, but we should have a secure border, and it ain’t that hard to do.”
The comments, which aired in Wednesday’s episode of the podcast and have since spread widely across X and YouTube, represent one of the sharpest public breaks between the Vermont independent and the party he caucuses with.
“Biden didn’t do it,” he added, going on to fault several administrations for failing to enforce border security and laws prohibiting illegal immigration.
The clip quickly drew attention across the political spectrum, with the Republican National Committee’s research division sharing it on X just hours after it aired.
Sanders, who twice sought the presidency on a populist economic platform, has occasionally diverged from his party’s stance on immigration. During the 2020 campaign, he cautioned Democrats against embracing “open borders” rhetoric. In his latest comments, he said the United States has the “technology and manpower” to secure the border but argued that leaders in both parties have failed to act effectively.
“I’m not going to sit here and tell you that overall [Biden] did a good job — it was not,” Sanders said, per Fox News.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded 2.47 million migrant encounters in fiscal year 2023 — the highest number ever reported — compared with roughly 458,000 during President Trump’s final year in office, Fox noted.
Sanders made his remarks while promoting his new book, “Fight Oligarchy,” and responding to host Tim Dillon’s questions about the future direction of the Democratic Party’s platform.
The comments represent a notable shift from Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, when he downplayed concerns about a “border crisis” and accused then-President Trump of “demonizing immigrants.”
During a Fox News town hall in March 2020, Sanders said he “would not close the borders” even in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, calling such measures “xenophobic.”
Earlier, in January 2019, as President Trump delivered a prime-time address urging immediate action to address what he called a border crisis, Sanders dismissed the warning, saying, “We don’t need to create artificial crises” at the border.
Given that kind of history, Sanders’ remarks on the podcast mark a significant reversal on the issue, as well as a ringing endorsement of Trump’s strict border enforcement efforts.
Trump has appointed longtime border enforcer Tom Homan as his “border czar.” Homan discussed his role and why he decided to come out of retirement to take the job after Trump offered it last year in an exclusive interview in Washington, D.C., with The Alex Marlow Show podcast.
He talked with Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Marlow in detail what he characterized as the human and social costs of policies promoting mass immigration. When asked about the threats and attacks against him on a daily basis, Homan told Marlow: “I don’t care.”
“If they held the dead children I’ve held, talked to little girls as young as 9 who were raped multiple times by handlers from the cartel, standing on the back of a tractor-trailer when 19 people are at your feet because they baked to death, including a 5-year-old boy…running operation in Arizona where alien smuggling cartels are ripping bodies from each other with drugs, and when someone couldn’t pay their smuggling fees, they’d torture them and call their relatives and let them listen while they torture them and kill them because they couldn’t pay the fees. These are just a few things,” Homan said.
