Former President Donald Trump went on the offensive in his first debate with President Joe Biden and attempted to connect the Democratic administration’s border policies directly to a wave of headlines on crime committed by illegal immigrants.
“We are living right now in a rat’s nest. They’re killing our people in New York, in California, and every state in the union because we don’t have borders anymore. Every state is now a border,” Trump said during the CNN presidential debate Thursday night in Atlanta. “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.”
The murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley earlier this year became so politically explosive that Biden mentioned her at his State of the Union, while last week, Oklahoma police arrested a Venezuelan illegal immigrant believed to have brutally killed Rachel Morin, a mother of five in Maryland, last summer.
Other incidents, including attacks on New York police plus sexual assaults and murders against preteen girls and single women in Texas and Iowa, have also attracted media coverage this month.
“We’re literally an uncivilized country now,” said Trump. “We have to get a lot of these people out, and we have to get them out fast because they’re going to destroy our country. Just take a look at where they’re living. They’re living in luxury hotels in New York City and other places.”
Biden leaned on a Senate border deal that fell apart earlier this year when asked why voters should “trust” him in a second term given the “record” number of illegal immigrants encountered during his tenure.
The number of arrests at the southern border reached a new all-time high in December with 250,000 apprehensions that month, but has since come down to 120,000 in May — still far above the norm of 50,000 arrests per month.
“We worked very hard to get a bipartisan agreement that not only changed all that, but made sure that we enter a situation where you had no circumstance where they could come across the border with the number of border police there are now,” said Biden.
The Senate bipartisan border deal that the Biden administration helped negotiate last fall into early 2024 failed after being blocked by House Republicans, allegedly at Trump’s order not to give Democrats a win ahead of the November election.
More than 10,000 illegal immigrants continue to be apprehended by Border Patrol agents each week, according to Department of Homeland Security data released this week, though the figures have declined since Biden took executive action earlier this month to bar asylum seekers from seeking refuge at the southern border.
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Trump echoed claims he has previously made on the campaign trail, including that people from “insane asylums” and prisons had been sent from other countries into the United States. Democrats have generally sought to frame the “migrant crime” issue as Republican fear-mongering.
The border crisis has surged past all other voter concerns, including foreign policy, the economy, and abortion, to become the greatest concern, according to primary and caucus exit polling in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.
