What will be Chris Christie's first action as president? Sending the National Guard to the border

WASHINGTON - As a surge of migrants arrives across the southern border, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has offered a plan.

The 2024 presidential hopeful wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that his first action if elected to the White House will be to sign an executive order to send the National Guard to the border.

“Trump told everyone that he was going to build us a ‘big beautiful wall’ and that Mexico was going to pay for it,” Christie wrote. “We got 52 miles of new wall and haven’t received a single peso from Mexico. This disaster at the border is just as much his fault as it is Joe Biden’s.”

He added that he “will be the only person” to address the issue head on during the second GOP debate at Simi Valley, Calif., where he will spar with six other candidates vying for the Republican nomination.

Christie has made immigration a central theme in his campaign, blasting Trump and Biden for their border security and immigration policies.

During a CNN town hall in June, he said that “no matter how hard our Customs and Border patrol agents and our immigration and customs enforcement agents are working, they need backup.”

His recent comments on X come as 8,900 migrants were arrested at the border in just one day last week, as the New York Times reported.

New York Mayor Eric Adams has warned that the migrant crisis would "destroy New York City” earlier this month and the cost of housing migrants in the coming years could total as much as $12 billion.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Christie's first action as president? Send the National Guard to the border