During Thursday night’s simulcast of CNN’s presidential debate, former President Donald Trump repeatedly criticized President Biden for the ongoing crisis at the southern border, saying Biden has destroyed a secure border and turned the United States into a “rat den.”
“This is a man who has killed hundreds of thousands of people with his mismanagement of the border and who has killed Americans trying to cross the border. We’re in a bind right now,” Trump said.
The United States is facing a historic border crisis, with encounters with migrants breaking multiple records. Though incidents have fallen significantly in recent months since record highs in December, the crisis has overwhelmed communities across the country and led to numerous high-profile crimes committed by illegal immigrants. Republicans have blasted the Biden administration’s policies, and the administration says it needs more funding and reforms from Congress to fix a “broken” system.
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Trump repeatedly mentioned the crisis during the debate, pointing to crimes such as the alleged murder of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray in Texas by two illegal Venezuelan immigrants.
Migrants who crossed the border from Mexico wait to be processed by U.S. Border Patrol, with the U.S.-Mexico border barrier in the background, in Yuma, Arizona, on August 6, 2022. (Photo by Qian Weizhong/VCG via Getty Images)
“They’re killing our people in New York, they’re killing our people in California, they’re killing our people in every state in this union, because we don’t have a border anymore. Every state is a border now,” Trump said, “and because of his ridiculous, insane, very stupid policies, people are coming in and killing our people at levels we’ve never seen before.”
“We’re calling this immigration crime. I’m calling it Biden immigration crime. They’re killing our people at a level we’ve never seen before,” he said.
Trump has repeatedly attacked Biden’s handling of the border crisis, not just on the border but on other topics such as Social Security and climate change. Polls have repeatedly shown that many voters are unhappy with Biden’s handling of border security, which remains a top concern for many voters.
Biden defended himself when asked by debate moderators about his record on the border, saying he worked to pass a bipartisan Senate bill that would have provided more funding and mechanisms to restrict immigration into the US, but the bill has yet to gain enough support to pass the Senate.
President Joe Biden (R) and Republican presidential candidate, former U.S. President Donald Trump, participate in the CNN presidential debate at CNN Studios in Atlanta, Georgia, June 27, 2024. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
“In addition, we [Trump] “When I was president, he was taking babies away from their mothers, putting them in cages, making sure families were separated. That’s not the way to do things. That’s the only thing I’ve done since I changed the law.”
He appeared to be referring to a recent executive order that limits some asylum applications if contact exceeds a certain level, which led to a 40% drop in contacts in the last month.
“The situation is better than when the president left office, and we’re going to continue to pursue a full-scale effort, including increasing the number of Border Patrol agents and asylum officers, until we get a full ban,” he said.
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“I have no idea what he said at the end of that sentence, and I don’t think he knows what he said,” Trump countered.
“Look, we had the most secure border in the history of this country. All he had to do was leave the border open. He decided to open the border up, to people from prisons, mental hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, to terrorists. Right now we have the largest influx of terrorists in this country. Not just from South America, we have terrorists from all over the world. They’re coming from the Middle East. We have terrorists from everywhere, from all over the world. And this guy left the border open.”
Biden accused Trump of “lying” and said there was no data to back up his claims.
Trump then contrasted the treatment of veterans with the treatment of immigrants.
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“It’s unbelievable what the VA is doing to our veterans. We have veterans living on the streets. And these people are living in luxury hotels,” he said.
Trump then turned a question about drug overdoses in the United States – many of which are caused by fentanyl smuggled across the border – into an attack on Biden at the border.
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“The number of drugs and trafficked women coming across the border is the worst I’ve ever seen. It’s numbers that nobody has seen under his administration, because the border is so bad,” he said.
Biden again touted the bipartisan efforts and funding he undertook to combat fentanyl at the border, including funding for more fentanyl-detecting equipment, but argued that Trump had gutted the deal.
“This bipartisan agreement is about more fentanyl machines that can detect drugs, more agents, more people on the border. And when this agreement was reached, he called his Republican colleagues and said, ‘Stop it. This is going to hurt us politically.’ He never argued that this isn’t a good bill. It’s a really good bill. We need these machines.”
