Former President Donald Trump, during the CNN Presidential Debate Simulcast Thursday night, repeatedly hammered President Biden over the ongoing crisis at the southern border — saying Biden had wrecked a secure border and turned the U.S. into a “rats nest.”
“He’s the one that killed people with the bad border including hundreds of thousands of people dying, and also killing our citizens when they come in. We are living right now in a rats’ nest,” Trump said.
The U.S. has been facing a historic border crisis, with numbers of migrant encounters that have repeatedly smashed records. While numbers have dropped sharply in recent months from a record high in December, the crisis has overwhelmed communities across the U.S. there have been a number of high profile crimes committed by illegal immigrants. Republicans have blamed Biden-era policies, while the administration has said it needs more funding and reform from Congress to fix a “broken” system.
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Trump returned repeatedly to the crisis in the debate, noting crimes including a murder of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray allegedly by two Venezuelan illegal immigrants in Texas.
“They’re killing our people in New York and California and every state in the union because we don’t have borders anymore. Every state is now a border,” Trump said. “And because of his ridiculous, insane and very stupid policies, people are coming in and they’re killing our citizens at a level that we’ve never seen.”
“We call it migrant crime. I call it Biden migrant crime, they’re killing our citizens at a level that we’ve never seen before,” he said.
Trump repeatedly turned questions, not just about the border but about social security, climate change and other topics, into attacks on Biden’s handling of the border crisis. Polls have shown repeatedly that voters largely disapprove of Biden’s handling of border security and it has remained a top issue of concern for many voters.
Biden defended his record on the border when asked about it by the debate moderators, and noted that he had helped to get a bipartisan Senate bill that would provide more funding and a mechanism to limit some entries into the U.S. But it has not yet received enough support to pass the chamber.
“In addition to that, we found ourselves in a situation when [Trump] was president, he was separating babies from their mothers, put them in cages, making sure the families were separated. That’s not the right way to go. What I’ve done since I’ve changed the law.”
He appeared to be referring to a recent executive order that limits some asylum claims when encounters exceed a certain level, which has been followed in the last month by a 40% decrease in encounters.
“It’s better than when he left office, and I’m going to continue to move until we get the total ban on…the total initiative relative to what we’re going to do with more border patrol and more asylum officers,” he said.
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Trump shot back: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.
“Look, we had the safest border in the history of our country All he had to do is leave it. He decided to open up our border, open up our country to people that are from prisons, people that are from mental institutions, insane asylums, terrorists. We have the largest number of terrorists coming into our country right now. All terrorists all over the world, not just in South America, all over the world. They come from the Middle East. Everywhere, all over the world are pouring in. And this guy just left it open.”
Biden accused Trump of “lying” and said there’s no data to support what he said.
Trump would later go on to contrast the treatment of veterans to how migrants are being treated.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE COVERAGE OF THE BORDER SECURITY CRISIS
“What they’re doing to the VA to our veterans is unbelievable and veterans are living in the street. And these people are living in luxury hotels,” he said.
Trump would later turn a question about drug overdoses in the U.S., many of which come from fentanyl smuggled across the border, into a criticism of Biden on the border.
“The numbers of the amount of drugs and human trafficking in women coming across our border, the worst thing I’ve ever seen — at numbers that nobody’s ever seen, under him, because the border is so bad,” he said.
Biden went back to touting bipartisan efforts and funding fights he had taken on in relation to tackling fentanyl at the border, including money for more fentanyl detection machines. But he claimed Trump torpedoed the deal.
“This bipartisan deal, more fentanyl machines to be able to detect drugs, more numbers of agents, more numbers of all the people at the border. And when we had that deal done, he went he called his Republican colleagues said, ‘Don’t do it. It’s going to hurt me politically.’ He never argued, it’s not a good bill. It’s a really good bill. We need those machines.”
