Trump Insists He 'Completed the Wall' Before Revealing That 'Sections Were Being Built' and That He Wants to Build More

President Donald Trump claimed to have built "hundreds of miles" of the wall he promised to build on the border between the United States and Mexico during his first presidency, stating that he wanted to continue building it after claiming it was completed.

Trump discussed immigration and border policies on Tuesday when he sat down for an interview with TIME Magazine at the White House.

During the interview, the 47th President was asked if his focus was on concentrating power into the hands of the executive branch of government, following his challenges to the courts and his willingness to fire the leaders of independent agencies. Trump responded by insisting that he had been doing exactly what he said he would do while campaigning.

"No, I think that what I'm doing is exactly what I've campaigned on. If you look at what I campaigned on, for instance, you can talk about removing people from the country. We have to do it because Biden allowed people to come in through his open border crazy, insanity. He allowed people to come into our country that we can't have in our country," said Trump.

He was then asked if he was concentrating more power into the Presidency specifically.

"I don't think so. I think I'm using it properly, and I'm also using it as per my election. You know, everything that I'm doing—this is what I talked about doing. I said that I'm going to move the criminals out. I saw what was happening early on when I heard that he had open borders, when I, because it was a hard thing to believe," Trump began.

"I built hundreds of miles of wall, and then he didn't want to, and we had another, an extra hundred miles that I could have put up because I ordered it as extra. I completed the wall, what I was doing, but we have, I wanted to build additional because it was working so well. An extension. And he didn't want to do that," he continued.

"And when he said he wasn't going to do that, I said, 'Well, he must want open borders.' There were sections that were being built. And he stopped work on it, and I said, this guy actually wants to have open borders. That's going to be a tragedy for our country. That's going to mean that other countries will release into our country some very rough people," he concluded.

Trump claimed that one of his main goals for his first presidency was to build a "big, beautiful wall" along the border between the United States and Mexico in order to reduce immigration between the two countries.

"The wall in 2016 was symbolic of Donald Trump: common sense, practical solutions, simplified answers — as opposed to long nuanced, detailed policy speak," Sam Nunberg, the architect of the policy, told Business Insider

During a rally in New Hampshire in August of 2020, Trump claimed that the wall was "almost complete". However, only three miles had been built on fresh ground as of May 2020, The Washington Post reported.