Former President Donald J. Trump reiterated his hardline stance on immigration during Thursday's debate, calling illegal immigrants a threat to U.S. jobs, national security and Social Security. President Biden offered little pushback.
Trump argued that his policies have opened up the U.S.-Mexico border, allowing crime and drugs to flood into cities and turning every state into a border state.
“We're living in a rat's nest right now,” Trump said. “People are being killed in New York, in California, in every state in the United States because we don't have borders anymore.” It was one of many comments Trump made that were false, taken out of context or misleadingly vague.
Biden, meanwhile, did not lay out a broader strategy on an issue that has become one of the Republican Party's thorniest political weaknesses, nor did he refute comments on immigration that many historians say could incite violence.
The president's strongest defense of illegal immigration came more than an hour into the debate, when he suggested that illegal immigration was “the reason America has the most successful economy in the world.”
While the portion of the debate devoted to immigration was brief, both Trump and Biden repeatedly focused on the issue.
Ten minutes into his first topic, the economy, Trump claimed Biden “has created the only jobs for illegal immigrants.” A few minutes later, on the issue of abortion, Biden seemed to try to argue that Trump was focused on young women killed by immigrants, but not on women killed by strict abortion regulations. But Biden misspoke. Trump responded by denouncing “a lot of young women killed by the same people we let across our border.”
Inevitably, some contradictions emerged. Biden, despite his muddled answers, tried to highlight his efforts to pass bipartisan legislation to hire more asylum judges and boost border security spending. He touted his success in reducing the number of migrants in recent months.
Trump claimed the border had never been safer under his administration. Without providing evidence, he said immigrants were living in “luxury hotels” while veterans remained on the streets, and that immigrants were taking jobs from black and Latino Americans and overtaxing public services like Medicare and Social Security. He often conflated immigrants with criminals, though broader statistics do not support the idea that immigrants fuel violent crime. He also avoided answering questions about whether his plans for mass deportations would involve all illegal immigrants, including those who have jobs, are married to U.S. citizens, or have lived in the U.S. for decades.
Some Democrats and leaders of Latino and immigrant rights groups, who had hoped Biden would deliver a message rooted in toughness and compassion in line with his recent executive orders, saw the performance as a missed opportunity.
They expected the candidates to offer very different views on the issue, but they ended up pretty similar. They said Democrats have struggled to figure out how to talk about these tough questions, while Republicans have often filled the void with fear, anger, resentment and bigotry.
Pablo Alvarado, a U.S. citizen and activist who fled war-torn El Salvador, said he found both candidates weak. Trump has scapegoated the least powerful people in U.S. society and Biden has failed to protect them, he said.
“My feeling as an immigrant is that we are alone,” said Alvarado, co-executive director of the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, a Los Angeles-based union. “We have to organize. We have to protect ourselves.”
Simon Hankinson, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, rejected the idea that Trump's comments were dangerous, saying he was only referring to a small segment of the immigrant population who are in the country illegally.
“It's pretty hard to ask Biden to counter negative perceptions of illegal immigration when there are so many cases of young girls murdered by men who were purposefully released or paroled by the Biden administration,” he said.