WASHINGTON–President Donald Trump said Thursday that New York City Democrat mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s desire to close Rikers Island if elected is “not good” in response to a question from Breitbart News.
In Wednesday night’s New York City mayoral debate, Mamdani said, “What I have said time and again is, and I’ll repeat it again, is yes, we have to close Rikers Island–Rikers Island is a stain on the history of this city–and that this current administration has made it nearly impossible to do so by the stipulated timeline.”
“So what I will do is everything in my power to try and meet that deadline,” he added.
During a Homeland Security Task Forces roundtable event in the State Dining Room, Breitbart News asked Trump what kind of impact closing Rikers Island would have on public safety, which prompted Attorney General Pam Bondi to shake her head in disagreement with far-left Mamdani’s vision.
“Well, it’s not good. I guess it’s not a very nice place. But you need it,” Trump said. “You need something. You have a lot of additional people in New York City that should not have been here. They came here through the open border.”
“You know, I don’t know how they even do it. New York City has always been tight for money, and then they spend, you know, $8 billion, and nobody complains about it, on people that just showed up and they just came out of nowhere. Where did they get the money? All of a sudden they have money,” he added.
Trump said that prisons must be kept “very fair and very safe,” but noted, “you get a lot of criminals.”
“We have a lot of additional criminals,” he said. “I used to talk about it, they used to say, ‘Well, only good people come in from foreign countries.’ I said, ‘That’s not right.’ I didn’t know that for a fact, but it had just started, right, the open borders and people flowing in by the millions. They make our criminals look like the nicest people on Earth. That’s the only good thing, they make our criminals look like nice people.”
“They are the meanest, the most vicious. Tren de Aragua; you don’t get any sicker. They cut people’s fingers off because they called the cop. ‘Did you call the cop?’ ‘Yes.’ They cut off his finger so he can’t call the cop anymore. And then they say, ‘Next time, we’re going to cut off your hand… because they took over his apartment in Colorado.”
Trump also called out Gov. Jared Polis (D-CO), calling him “weak.”
“You know, Colorado, they took over a town, then they took over another town, and you have a weak governor over there,” he said. “He doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing, so he lets it go on. But we’re getting them out of here. We’re getting them all out. They’re going back to lots of–not just Venezuela–they’re going back to lots of countries. Venezuela would be one, however.”
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