President Donald Trump speaks to the media after signing a bill for border funding in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, on July 1, 2019. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images) Donald Trump

By Katabella Roberts March 26, 2021 Updated: March 26, 2021 biggersmallerPrint

Former President Donald Trump on March 25 responded to President Joe Biden’s claims that he had left children to “starve to death” on the Mexican side of the border.

Trump joined “The Ingraham Angle” on Fox News on Thursday to respond to President Biden’s first press conference of his term, which was held earlier that day, following mounting pressure from critics and journalists wondering why Biden was taking so long to hold a briefing.

During the conference, Biden appeared to accuse Trump of leaving migrant children to “starve to death” on the Mexican side of the southern border and vowed that his administration would not do the same.

“If an unaccompanied child ends up at the border, we’re just going to let him starve to death and stay on the other side—no previous administration did that either, except Trump. I’m not going to do it,” Biden told reporters.

Trump branded the comments from the Delaware Democrat as completely false and said that the situation at the border currently is “outrageous.”

“First of all, it’s just the opposite,” Trump said. “By the time we finished what we were doing [on the border], very few people were coming up because they knew they weren’t going to get through. We stopped ‘catch and release’, which was a disaster.

“The very biggest thing was, we had the Remain In Mexico policy, and that means that we wouldn’t allow people to wait in our country until they were totally checked out, which most of them didn’t get checked out, and they would go back to their own country.”

“If young kids were with parents, but a lot of times, they weren’t, and we would take care of them, but … what they are doing now is outrageous. And they should finish the wall,” Trump added.

Elsewhere during Thursday’s press conference, Biden blamed the surge at the border—which has seen tens of thousands of illegal aliens attempt to enter the United States—on his predecessor and claimed the vast majority of illegal border-crossers “are being sent back.”

The president defended his decision to reverse the “Remain in Mexico” policy implemented by Trump—a move critics have said has encouraged a surge in illegal immigration.

Biden said it wouldn’t stop the number of people arriving at the border. An ongoing immigration policy tracker by the Heritage Foundation found that Biden has rolled back almost all of Trump’s immigration policies.

A total of 16,513 unaccompanied illegal alien minors were in the custody of either Customs and Border Protection or the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as of March 23, according to the HHS Administration for Children and Families.

Biden said there will be a military facility at Fort Bliss in Texas to hold 5,000 beds for unaccompanied minors that would be open this week at the border.

“We’re providing for the space, again, to be able to get these kids out of the Border Patrol facilities, which no child—no one should be in any longer than 72 hours,” he told reporters.

Bowen Xiao contributed to this report.