"First of all, the tear gas is a very minor form of the tear gas itself. It's very safe. The ones that were suffering, to a certain extent, were the people that were putting it out there… Why is a parent running up into an area where they know the tear gas is forming and it's going to be formed. And they are running up with a child. And in some cases, you know, they are not the parents. They are people. They call them 'grabbers.' They grab a child because they think they are gonna have a certain status by having a child," Trump told reporters.
The statement comes after, a group of around 500 migrants attempted to storm the US border from the Mexican city of Tijuana on 25 November. The US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) service said that several asylum-seekers had thrown projectiles, which prompted US authorities to use tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse the crowd.
READ MORE: Mexico Sends Note to US Demanding Investigation Into Use of Tear Gas at Border
Last week, a caravan of about 5,600 asylum-seeking migrants from poor Central American countries reached the cities of Tijuana and Mexicali near the US border.
US authorities have deployed several thousand troops to prevent the caravan from crossing the border while Trump called for closing parts of it.