From ABC News In Tuesday night’s presidential debate, Donald Trump repeatedly brought up immigration, an issue he believes will help him win in November.
That meant a flood of derogatory comments about immigrants. He said they “They’re pouring into our country from prisons and jails, mental institutions and asylums,” he said, adding that the immigrants coming in are “criminals of the highest order.” Trump couldn’t stop repeating the unspeakable racist lie that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eat pets. (The last of these led to a bizarre interaction, with the supervisors saying, Fact check(The former president’s claim that he eats animals was met with fierce backlash when Trump interrupted him by saying, “People on television are saying that my dogs were taken and eaten for food.”)
But when it came to framing immigration, Trump ultimately had the last word on the debate stage, both literally and figuratively. Just before the showdown ended, the former president used his closing remarks to define the issue in his own ridiculous terms. “What these people have done to our country, and perhaps the most heinous thing, is that we have allowed millions of people to come into our country, many of whom are criminals, and they are destroying our country,” he said.
The entire debate on immigration, to the extent that it happened, existed in Trump’s toxic thinking. The only political point raised on immigration on stage was enforcement.
Harris hinted at reviving a broad, now-defunct bipartisan Senate immigration bill that would have added 1,500 Border Patrol agents to the force and raised the bar for asylum seekers. The proposed bill, which the Biden administration has described as the “strongest” border enforcement measure in decades, has somehow become synonymous with compromise on immigration, even though it does little to advance Democrats’ longstanding promise to legalize the illegal immigrant population. (Trump killed the bill to avoid giving Democrats a victory on what seemed like a tough issue.)
Trump’s misleading generalizations about “immigrant crime” were largely uncontested by Harris and the media—and sometimes even reinforced. In a post-debate response where J.D. Vance defended Trump’s Springfield lie, CNN commentators vehemently rebutted criticism that the media had failed to cover isolated incidents of immigrant violence. “There was all this talk and all this reporting about immigrant crime, and every state is a border state,” said Chris Wallace. (He did not cite data showing that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than U.S. citizens.)
On stage, Trump didn’t have to explain how he would carry out his potentially catastrophic and inhumane plan to deport millions of illegal immigrants from the United States. He simply bragged that “millions of criminals” and “terrorists” were entering the country to vote for Democrats. Trump didn’t even answer why he had scuttled a bipartisan deal that would have granted Republicans’ wishes on border restrictions without providing a path to legalization for illegal immigrants. Instead, he evaded the question by challenging Harris’s clearing of the rally crowd and then shifting to a question about immigrants eating pets.
Needless to say, on every issue Harris and Trump have, especially immigration, the contrast is stark. First, she has not pledged to build massive detention camps to house thousands of immigrants or to deploy the military to secure the border. But when given the chance to make that distinction even more compelling, Harris has not taken advantage of it. She has not condemned Trump’s mass deportation scheme, and she has not challenged his repeated claims that immigrants commit crimes and pose an existential threat to the United States.
Harris, who has a proven track record of advocating for immigrants, instead said no when asked about the Biden administration’s border policies. Wearing a prosecutorial hat, she touted her experience linking immigration to crime, tackling “international criminal organizations trafficking guns, drugs and people.” Harris attacked Trump for sabotaging a bipartisan border deal, saying he “prefers to fix problems rather than solve them.”
Given the current state of the immigration debate, that might be a safer strategy on such a polarizing issue. But advocates and immigrant rights groups have long challenged the notion that immigration is inherently a burden on the Biden administration and Deputy Harris, and they have urged them to take an unapologetically pro-immigrant stance and go on the offensive against the Republican Party’s xenophobic agenda.
Ahead of the debate, I spoke with Michelle Ming, political director for the immigrant-youth-led United We Dream network. On Monday, the organization’s political and campaigns arm endorsed Harris, saying in a statement that its goal is to prevent another Trump presidency and mass deportations. “We know the fear our community has experienced during his presidency, and the uncertainty of whether they will be able to spend another day in this country without being caught, deported or arrested,” Ming said. “We feel deeply that we can’t go back to that, and our community can’t endure four more years of that.”
But that doesn’t mean they’re all for Harris. “I think Kamala Harris’ job is to try to differentiate herself from Trump, not to try to be more Republican than Trump on immigration. And frankly, that’s what she’s trying to do right now, and it’s what the Democrats are telling her to do,” she added. “That’s not a winning strategy.”
