On Saturday, the Biden campaign denounced Donald Trump for allegedly preparing to quickly and drastically intensify his first-term immigration crackdown in the event that he were to win the presidency again.
Trump plans to reinstate several of his first-term measures, such as the so-called Muslim ban and the use of Title 42 to deny asylum applications, if he wins the 2024 election. According to a recent New York Times story, he reportedly plans to deport millions of migrants annually, holding them in huge camps until they are sent elsewhere.
Along with other strict regulations, the former president also wants to remove birthright citizenship for children born to undocumented immigrants.
In a statement, Biden campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said, “Mass detention camps, attempts to deny children born here citizenship, uprooting families with mass deportations—this is the horrifying reality that awaits the American people if Donald Trump is allowed anywhere near the Oval Office again.” “It is my belief that a scared and divided country will help him win this election,” said the guy who hatched these extremist, bigoted, and cruel plans with his goon Stephen Miller.
In his usual lengthy speeches on the southern border at campaign rallies, Trump has frequently alluded to these ideas. According to the Times, Stephen Miller, a top assistant who developed many of Trump’s policies during his first term, is now again closely involved in the planning.
At a rally on Saturday in New Hampshire, Trump declared, “We’ll stop the invasion on our southern border and begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
Joe Biden and his government deliberately chose to leave our border open, which lets dangerous narcotics, people traffickers, and criminals into American neighborhoods. A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, Steven Cheung, said in a statement, “President Trump will secure the border and ensure Americans are safe once again when he returns to the White House.”
The Biden administration has struggled to control rising immigration rates, just as the Trump administration has, and the Republican field has seized on the border as a base-rallying issue, proposing to bomb Mexico to break up cartels and use deadly force against migrants suspected of drug trafficking. Immigration will be a political lightning rod in 2024.
Republicans are demanding changes to border policies in exchange for funding for Ukraine and Israel, adding another difficult layer to the already difficult discussions on the Hill to enact Biden’s national security supplemental package. Congress has made little headway in reconstructing an antiquated system that is inadequate to handle the crisis.
In the midst of hurried legislative deliberations, leftists and immigrant organizations are putting increasing political pressure on President Biden to resist giving in to long-term policy concessions.
Immigration advocacy groups frequently bring up Biden’s remarks from 2020, during which he discussed the restoration of the severely damaged asylum system during the Trump administration. Biden sent a measure to reform the immigration system on his first day in office, but it was never taken up by Congress.
Unable to carry out the significant transformation he had previously pledged, Biden has devoted his presidency to fending off criticism from both Democrats and Republicans for his reinstatement of Trump-era regulations like the so-called transit ban.
One of these policies is the “asylum ban.”
On Tuesday, the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security unveiled a proposed rule that would prevent some migrants from requesting asylum in the United States if they enter the country illegally or neglect to ask for safe harbor in another nation first. President Joe Biden gave a preview of the regulation in January. According to a senior government official who briefed the media, it will be implemented with the conclusion of the COVID public health emergency on May 11th, after a 30-day public comment period.
The White House’s most severe border control action to date, the new plan, is what immigration activists regard to as the “transit ban” or “asylum ban” and will effectively be its policy response to the long-awaited repeal of Title 42. Shortly after it was posted, Democrats and proponents of immigration received a barrage of criticism directed at the Biden administration, accusing officials of continuing the Trumpian strategy of border politics, which Biden had vowed to abandon during the campaign. Lawsuit threats also started to circulate.
In a call with reporters, administration representatives denied that the new rule was the same as the Trump transit ban, emphasizing that it did not constitute a “categorical ban” on asylum seekers. Rather, they claimed, the administration had extended “existing lawful pathways” through the parole programs, and the goal of the actions was to help maintain order at the southern border rather than discourage individuals from applying for asylum.
Although a major part of Biden’s 2020 platform was his criticism of Trump administration policies, it’s unclear how frequently the president will discuss immigration this time around. However, it is certain that his team will keep taking advantage of any chance to compare the president to the front-runner in the GOP race.
“When they elected Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and ousted Donald Trump in 2020, the American people chose unity over division and hope over fear, and they’ll do it again next year,” Moussa said.
