LAS VEGAS– In his 2020 campaign, Joe Biden pledged to undo former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, specifically expressing frustration with a policy that places limits on the number of asylum seekers accepted at the southern border each day.
This year, Biden backed a Senate proposal that would set daily limits on border crossings — and Democrats plan to campaign to re-elect him by emphasizing that Republicans caused the deal to collapse.
Democrats are reframing the immigration debate, ranging from embracing more welcoming policies in response to the Trump administration’s programs at the border — including the separation of hundreds of immigrant children from their parents — to declaring they can crack down on border security and can adopt long-term policies. wanted by the Republicans. Biden’s rhetorical shift threatens to strain his support from immigrants and their advocates who campaigned for him in 2020, but it appears to be working for Democrats after they won a special election in New York.
“We need to respond to this and not just in terms of border security, but also in terms of strong border security combined with more legal options,” said Maria Cardona, a Democratic strategist. “They tried to do it the Republican way, and the Republicans weren’t serious about it.”
Democrat Tom Suozzi, who won Tuesday’s special election in New York for the House of Representatives seat once occupied by ousted Republican Rep. George Santos, took out ads calling for increased border security and doing an interview on Fox News in which he supported the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Enforcement.
His district includes parts of Queens, a diverse New York neighborhood that has hosted thousands of migrants bused from the border.
Suozzi also shares Biden’s stance on creating a path to citizenship for hundreds of thousands of immigrants called “dreamers” who are in the country illegally after coming to the U.S. with their families as children.
Rep. Adriano Espaillat, a New York Democrat, said he doesn’t think the reframing of the immigration debate will backfire.
“I think we can agree that under a Biden administration it is much better than a possible repeat of Trump,” Espaillat said.
But for many immigrant advocates, the deal Biden negotiated with Senate leaders showed how a president who had long viewed Trump’s border policies as inhumane was willing to curtail asylum in exchange for war aid to Ukraine.
More than 130 organizations from across the country sent a letter to Biden opposing the deal and stricter asylum standards. Some immigration activists expressed frustration with Biden and a lack of enthusiasm for knocking on doors for him at a recent meeting of more than a dozen advocacy groups in Arizona.
Julián Castro, the former San Antonio mayor and secretary of Housing and Urban Development who ran against Biden for the presidential nomination in 2020, suggested that Biden and his allies are breaking the terms of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement and its leader from Republican Senate Mitch McConnell. .
“Democrats, you will never be cruel enough, ‘tough’ enough, anti-immigrant enough or able to talk your way to the negotiating table with McConnell and MAGA,” Castro said. “Stop playing their game.”
The border proposal would for the first time include a right to legal aid for vulnerable asylum seekers, such as children aged 13 and under, and would have increased the limit on available immigrant visas by 250,000 over the next five years. The National Border Police Council and the Chamber of Commerce supported it.
“The president stands with the overwhelming majority of Americans who are demanding action from Washington to address our long-broken immigration system,” Kevin Munoz, a spokesman for Biden’s campaign, said in a statement. “MAGA Republicans, led by Donald Trump, have chosen to abdicate their responsibilities so they can demonize immigrants to score political points.”
Interviews with Democrats in Nevada, a critical swing state in the likely rematch between Biden and Trump in November, show that many people in Biden’s party are lining up behind him.
More than 30% of Nevada’s 3.1 million residents identify as Hispanic or Latino, according to U.S. Census data. The state also has large Filipino, Chinese American and black communities. According to Pew Research Center estimates, Nevada has the highest share of immigrants who are in the country illegally and are part of the labor force.
Trump recently gathered supporters on an indoor soccer field in a largely Latino neighborhood a few miles from the Las Vegas Strip, where he suggested the U.S. had the “worst border in the history of the world.”
“Our border has become a weapon of mass destruction,” he told a crowd of supporters.
Biden campaigned in Nevada days later, focusing on why he viewed Trump as an enduring threat to democracy and calling a possible second Trump term a “nightmare.”
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a Nevada Democrat and the only Hispanic woman in the Senate, said her constituents want to see an “orderly process at the border.” She said they are still demanding broad immigration reform that would legalize the status of “dreamers” and others who have only temporary protection from deportation.
“We can work on a broken immigration system, but also secure our border,” Cortez Masto said in an interview. “Many of the Nevadans I’ve talked to, including in the Latino community, understand that because they want safe communities. They understand that. It doesn’t mean we won’t continue working to fix this broken immigration system.”
Cortez Masto said she hopes that after the failure of the border deal, the public sees that Republicans were not looking for solutions.
“They want the chaos, they want to use it as a political opportunity, they want to favor Donald Trump and serve him,” she said. Senate Republicans said they were blocking it because it was insufficient.
Michael Kagan, director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, criticized the Biden-backed proposal as straying far from what many Democrats consider necessary immigration reform. Kagan argued that Biden’s shift to the right would backfire politically.
“Unfortunately, he has largely adopted Donald Trump’s terms in the debate that a success is only a success if fewer people come,” Kagan said. “If that’s the goal you’ve set, I think voters will wonder, ‘Why not just pick the toughest person possible?’”
Gabriel Aldebot, a 66-year-old union electrician in Las Vegas, said he believed lawmakers should secure the border, and that a compromise that includes more enforcement resources is the best way to do that.
“The more bipartisanship there is, the more it seems like it’s fair to the people,” Aldebot said after voting for Biden in Nevada’s Democratic primary.