BEDMINSTER, N.J. — President Trump has gone on the attack against Democratic lawmakers who have called for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, seeking to seize a political advantage on an issue that has put him on the defensive for weeks.
The president hopes to craft a winning message for Republicans facing a forbidding midterm election.
“You get rid of ICE, you’re going to have a country that you’re going to be afraid to walk out of your house,’’ Trump said in a wide-ranging interview that aired on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.’’
The president encouraged Democratic candidates to embrace demands to dissolve the agency, saying that doing so would doom the party at the polls. “They’re going to get beaten so badly,’’ he said.
“I think they’ll never win another election,’’ he added. “So I’m actually quite happy about it.’’
The president spent part of his weekend at his New Jersey golf resort tweeting his support for the agency and its implementation of his “zero tolerance’’ immigration policy, which resulted in more than 2,000 children separated from their families along the southwest border and prompted an outcry from Democrats and many Republicans.
Border Patrol arrests fell sharply in June to the lowest level since February, ending a streak of four straight monthly increases, the Associated Press reported Sunday, citing a US official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The agency made more than 34,000 arrests on the border with Mexico during June, down 16 percent from more than 40,000 in May, the official said. The drop may reflect seasonal trends or it could signal that Trump’s ‘‘zero-tolerance’’ policy is having a deterrent effect.
Democrats have been united against Trump’s family separation policy, which he officially ended through an executive order. Only a small number have called for abolishing ICE.
On Saturday, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators gathered across the nation — including outside the White House and miles from Trump’s Bedminster resort — to protest the zero-tolerance policy and the government’s struggle to reunite families.
In a separate development Saturday, Trump claimed that he never pushed House Republicans to vote for immigration bills that failed last week, offering his latest display of whiplash on the legislation.
Trump tweeted from New Jersey that he didn’t press GOP lawmakers to support the plans because it wouldn’t have cleared the Senate. He wrote that he released many House Republicans ‘‘prior to the vote knowing we need more Republicans to win in Nov.’’
But the president’s statement contradicted his commentary three days ago in which he tweeted that House Republicans should approve the ‘‘strong but fair’’ bill even though Democrats wouldn’t allow it to pass the Senate.
A week earlier, he urged Republicans to stop wasting their time on the bill until after the elections.
Trump’s tweets were another twist in Republicans’ efforts to adopt changes to the nation’s immigration laws in the aftermath of highly publicized images and cries from young immigrant children being separated from their parents.
The GOP-led House soundly rejected a wide-ranging immigration bill last week despite Trump’s endorsement, a vote that followed the defeat on a harder-right package that garnered more conservative support.
GOP leaders are considering an alternative that would focus narrowly on preventing the government from separating children from migrant families caught entering the country without authorization.
But any changes are not expected to happen before the July Fourth holiday as lawmakers attempt to agree on bill language.
The issue has also been complicated by a federal judge who ordered that divided families be reunited with 30 days.
Republicans have been working on legislation that would keep migrant families together by lifting a court-ordered, 20-day limit on how long families can be detained.
