However, he praised the Trump administration’s approach to immigration control, saying: “We can disagree with many things the US president has said in recent times, but one thing he has done is control immigration.”
He claimed that six million undocumented migrants crossed the US southern border under Joe Biden, adding that crossings had now fallen to virtually zero each month.
Mr Farage also defended the administration’s handling of mass deportations, acknowledging there had been “one or two examples” highlighted by the press, but arguing that, overall, the approach had been “rather clever”.
Further clarifying the justification for the move, party home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf argued that Britain could not be a “refuge for the world” while “its own people die waiting for an ambulance”.
“For too long, the British people have been told to wait forever, wait for the ambulance, wait for the operation, wait for a home, wait in their own country, while foreign nationals jump the queue,” he said, “the waiting ends with us”.