Former Vice President Joe Biden criticized President Trump’s “racist invective” and called for a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and a new foreign policy direction in Latin America and the Caribbean as part of his presidential campaign’s first glimpse of his immigration policy.
Biden’s announcement, which appeared Monday in a Miami Herald op-ed, was as much a broad outline of his immigration and foreign policy ideas as it was a critique of Trump administration policies.
“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 — actions that subvert our American values and erode our ability to lead on the global stage,” according to Biden’s op-ed, which ran in the Miami Herald’s Spanish-language publication, El Nuevo Herald, as well.
“At a time when the challenges we face demand a united, regional response, Trump repeatedly invokes racist invective to describe anyone south of the Rio Grande, including calling migrants ‘animals’,” Biden wrote.
The op-ed comes just days after Hispanic leaders and grassroots groups criticized Biden for skipping a National Association of Latino Elected Officials conference in Miami and for saying relatively little about issues of specific importance to Latino voters. The op-ed drops just two days before the Democratic presidential candidates square off in Miami for their first debate.
In a nod to South Florida’s politically active Latin American and Caribbean communities, Biden also took Trump to task for ending Temporary Protective Status of immigrants, many of whom hail from Nicaragua, Haiti and El Salvador and who have large communities in Florida. While Trump has made a push in the Venezuelan-American community, Biden said it’s just lip service.
“To date, the Administration has made every effort to capitalize politically on the Venezuelan crisis, but its refusal to grant TPS to the thousands of Venezuelans fleeing persecution shows it cares little about the Venezuelan people’s suffering,” Biden wrote.
“Add to that Trump’s badgering Mexico with the threat of tariffs, flinging insults at vital partners like Colombia, and callously limiting the ability of Cuban-Americans to reunite with and support their families in Cuba,” Biden wrote, “and the Administration’s Latin America policy is at best a Cold War-era retread, and at worst an ineffective mess.”
Biden veered briefly into foreign policy by faulting Trump for the deteriorating conditions in the so-called Northern Triangle countries of Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador, though the Trump administration blames domestic problems in those countries for the flood of immigrants who have shown at the U.S.-Mexico border. The administration also has cut aid to those countries, which Biden says is a mistake.
And the former vice president took aim at Trump’s diplomacy in Venezuela, saying that “President Trump has badly misjudged what it will take to bring democracy back to Venezuela, and his increasing belligerence threatens the international coalition of more than 50 countries that recognize Juan Guaido as the interim President of Venezuela.”
However, Biden failed to mention that Trump’s administration was the first to recognize Guaido as the legitimate interim leader of Venezuela and had assembled the coalition of nations that oppose the Maduro regime.
Trump and his supporters have accused the Obama Administration of mismanaging Venezuela policy by failing to impose enough sanctions on Maduro’s regime and for Obama’s rapprochement with Cuba, which is an ally of Venezuela’s. Trump reversed many of Obama’s Cuba policies.
Republicans have also faulted the Obama administration for failing to pass immigration reform when Democrats controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress. But House Republicans killed a bipartisan immigration reform bill in 2013 that Biden largely still supports. During Trump’s first two years in office, a Republican-held Congress did nothing about immigration, failed to build a border wall and did not get Mexico to pay for it.
Biden called for the legalization of Dreamers and indicated he supported it for others: “The millions of undocumented people in the United States can only be brought out of the shadows through fair treatment, not ugly threats.”
Over the years, Biden has softened his rhetoric about immigration, as CNN documented in a story that pointed out Biden had spoken out about “sanctuary cities,” called Mexico “corrupt,” and labeled undocumented immigrants “illegals.” That language is gone from Biden’s op-ed, which instead uses the term “Latinx” to refer to Latinos.
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Biden had also bragged about voting for 700 miles of border fencing, and called for smarter uses of technology at the border.
“It’s imperative that we secure our borders, but ‘build the wall‘ is a slogan divorced from reality. It won’t stop the flow of illegal narcotics or human trafficking, both of which come primarily through legal ports of entry,” Biden wrote. “Nor will it stop asylum seekers fleeing the most desperate conditions imaginable, and who have the right to have their cases heard. Nor will it stem the numbers of undocumented, most of whom over-stay legal visas.”