The issue of immigration is at the heart of the 2024 presidential campaign and was also a major focus during the first presidential debate on Thursday night between President Joe Biden and presumptive Republican nominee Donald J. Trump.
Immigration is a top issue for voters and for Trump, while the Biden administration is grappling with the largest number of migrant encounters at the southern border in 20 years.
During the 90-minute debate on CNN in Atlanta, Biden defended his administration's handling of the immigration issue and blamed Trump for the failure of a bipartisan U.S. Senate agreement on border security.
Biden also cited this deal as a reason for his re-election, as the White House was able to negotiate this agreement in the first place.
“We worked very hard to reach a bipartisan agreement,” Biden said.
Senate Republicans rejected the bipartisan border security deal earlier this year, siding with their House colleagues and Trump. The deal would have significantly overhauled U.S. immigration law by creating a temporary process to close the border during peak travel times and raising hurdles for asylum applications.
Trump argued in the debate that Biden did not need laws to enforce policy changes at the southern border because “I didn't have any laws. I said close the border.”
In early June, Biden took his administration's most drastic anti-immigration measures, issuing an executive order that imposed a partial ban on asylum procedures at the southern border.
Trump called this action “insignificant.”
The debate took place a day after U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas gave a report from Tucson, Arizona, on the decline in encounters with migrants as a result of Biden's executive order.
He said that in the Tucson sector, “encounters with U.S. Border Patrol have decreased by more than 45 percent since the President took action, and returns of those encountered in Tucson have increased by nearly 150 percent.”
“Along the entire southern border, encounters with Border Patrol have decreased by over 40 percent,” Mayorkas said.
“Stay in Mexico” policy
Trump pointed to his previous policies, which he considered successful, and criticized Biden for reversing those policies, including a policy that required migrants to stay in Mexico while awaiting a decision on their asylum cases.
Biden criticized Trump's “zero tolerance” policy that separated parents from their children to deter illegal immigrants at the border.
“When he was president, he … separated babies from their mothers and put them in cages,” Biden said.
And without providing any evidence, Trump blamed immigrants for the crime, calling it “migrant crime.”
According to recent FBI statistics, violent crime in the United States has declined by 15 percent overall. Researchers have also found that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S. citizens.
Trump mentioned the death of nursing student Laken Riley from Georgia and blamed Biden's immigration policies.
“He is only making our country unsafe,” Trump said.
In late February, Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student at Augusta University, was reported missing by her roommate when she did not 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 her murder – an immigrant who had previously been arrested in Georgia for shoplifting and entered the country without authorization in 2022, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In response, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Laken Riley Act.
Trump was asked by debate moderators how he would carry out mass deportations, but did not go into detail.
He has repeatedly stated that he would conduct a mass deportation campaign against illegal immigrants, using local police forces, the National Guard and possibly the U.S. military. He did so during the campaign and in a lengthy interview with Time magazine.
“We have to get a lot of these people out, and we have to get them out fast, because they are destroying our country,” Trump said during the debate.
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