Former Vice President Joe Biden took swings at President Donald Trump’s immigration strategy in an op-ed published Monday, writing that it’s based in “hostility and inflammatory rhetoric,” while also presenting a few of his own immigration policy proposals.
The opinion piece, published in The Miami Herald, comes several days before nearly all of the 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls will face off in Miami during the season’s first primary debates.
In the piece, the Democratic presidential candidate writes that the President “is only interested in using his policies to assault the dignity of the Latinx community and scare voters to turn out on election day, not addressing the real challenges facing our hemisphere.”
Last week, Trump said he was delaying US Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that were planned to take place Sunday in 10 major US cities, saying deportations will proceed unless Congress finds a solution on the US-Mexico border.
Biden wrote that Trump’s proposed wall along the southern border is an ineffective way to slow the flow of immigrants in the US, and argues that under Trump, “there have been horrifying scenes at the border of kids being kept in cages, tear gassing asylum seekers, ripping children from their mothers’ arms.”
The piece from Biden also comes as a team of doctors, lawyers and advocates are warning of what they say are major health and hygiene problems at several CBP facilities in Texas, including a shortage of beds and inadequate clothing.
Biden included in the piece several things he says the next president should do to “institute effective immigration reform while restoring regional policies grounded in respect,” including securing the southern border by investing in border technology and “improving screening procedures at our legal ports of entry.”
Biden also wrote that the next president should recognize that “Dreamers,” the group of undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children, so-called because of the failed DREAM Act which would have offered them a pathway to citizenship, need Congress “to make it official.”
