Immigration is at the forefront of the 2024 presidential campaign and has also been a major focus of the campaign. during the first presidential debate President Joe Biden will meet with presumptive Republican Party candidate Donald J. Trump on Thursday evening.
Immigration is there the most critical issue for voters and for Trump, while the Biden administration grappled with having to deal with the highest number of migrant encounters on southern border in 20 years.
Biden defended his administration’s handling of immigration during a 90-minute debate on CNN in Atlanta and accused Trump of undermining a bipartisan U.S. Senate deal on border security.
Biden also pointed to the deal as a reason he should be re-elected because the White House was able to rig the deal.
“We worked very hard to reach a bipartisan agreement,” Biden said.
Senate Republicans rejected it bipartisan agreement on border security earlier this year, siding with his House colleagues and Trump. The deal would significantly change U.S. immigration law by creating a transient procedure to close the border during periods of activity and raising the bar for asylum applications.
Trump argued in the debate that Biden didn’t need legislation to make policy changes on the southern border because “I didn’t have legislation, I said, close the border.”
In early June, Biden carried out the most drastic immigration crackdown of his administration, issuance of an executive order which introduced a partial ban on asylum proceedings at the southern border.
Trump called the action “irrelevant.”
The debate came a day after U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas gave a briefing in Tucson, Arizona, on the decline in encounters with migrants following Biden’s executive order.
He said the Tucson sector “has seen a more than 45 percent decrease in U.S. Border Patrol encounters since the president took action, and repatriations of individuals encountered in Tucson have increased by nearly 150 percent.”
“Across the entire southern border, Border Patrol encounters are down more than 40 percent,” Mayorkas said.
“Remain in Mexico” Policy
Trump cited his past policies that he said were effective and criticized Biden for rolling them back, such as requiring migrants to remain in Mexico while awaiting asylum applications.
Biden sharply criticized Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, which separates parents from children to deter unauthorized immigrants at the border.
“When he was president, he… separated children from their mothers and put them in cages,” Biden said.
And Trump, without providing any evidence, blamed immigrants for committing crimes, calling it “migrant crime.”
The total violent crime rate in the country is decrease by 15%according to the latest FBI statistics and researchers discovered that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than US citizens.
Trump addressed the death of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley and blamed Biden’s immigration policies.
“All he does is make our country unsafe,” Trump said.
In behind schedule February, Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student at Augusta University, was reported missing by her roommate when she failed to return home after a run on the campus of the University of Georgia in Athens.
Local police found her body and soon after arrested a 26-year-old Venezuelan man for murder — an immigrant previously arrested in Georgia on shoplifting charges who U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said entered the country without authorization in 2022. Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives respond passed the Laken Riley Act.
Debate moderators asked Trump how he planned to carry out mass deportations, but he did not provide details.
He has repeatedly claimed he would launch a massive campaign to deport illegal immigrants, using local law enforcement, the National Guard and potentially the U.S. military. He did this during the campaign and during a lengthy interview with Time magazine.
“We need to get a lot of these people out and quickly because they are destroying our country,” Trump said during the debate.
