Donald Trump’s overarching narrative for the debate was that Joe Biden has diminished U.S. power by opening the border and allowing millions of “Illegal immigrants” released “From prisons, jails and mental institutions” to come into the country to “Take our jobs,” overwhelm our health care and Social Security systems, and rape and kill us.
Rather than pointing out Trump’s utter lack of concern for people’s well-being, Biden’s rebuttal fell into the trap of trying to respond to Trump’s tirades, allowing the former president to control the agenda and tone of the debate.
Trump used this as an opportunity to point out how little progress has been made under Biden and that Biden helped drive these disparities through his embrace of the “Superpredator” myth in the 1990s.
While many in the Biden administration and its key constituencies favor dialing back criminalization, they feel that it is politically impossible to state that clearly and openly, leaving the president to quietly support some good programs, while publicly leaning into a police-centered crime control strategy that will never be able to compete with Trump’s undiluted authoritarianism.
Biden’s weak policies and incoherent responses during the debate may give us another four years of Trump and his drive to turn the U.S. into a despotic kleptocracy.
Republicans: we don’t know, separate children from their families, let some of the kids die, cause generational trauma while withholding funding and processing.
Biden: let’s clean up the Republican mess again, institute fair and rational expedited immigration processing with limited capacity per day that keeps families together.
Trump did immigration “first” If you pretend he had a sound immigration policy, which he didn’t, he preferred detention and ignoring the problem, and you also ignore every president before him and then also you laud irresponsible choices that harm people and cost more money.
Trump kept a lot of them out of the country, and you’re pretty naive if you think kids aren’t getting separated from families or getting killed now. Human a sex trafficking are at an all time high right now. And detention at least kept them from killing and raping our citizens.