Members of President Joe Biden‘s reelection campaign preemptively excoriated former President Donald Trump ahead of dueling events Biden and Trump are holding at the U.S. southern border on Thursday.
Biden reelection national advisory board members Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D-IL), Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA), and Hispanic media director Maca Casado repeatedly slammed Trump over his scuttling of a $118 billion bipartisan border and foreign aid bill earlier this month.
“Trump’s need to boost his own fragile political ego has gotten us here with another manufactured logjam. A few weeks ago, there was a chance for a real breakthrough on immigration policy,” Pritzker said during a press call Wednesday afternoon.
“President Biden and congressional Democrats did what voters say they want from leaders. They sat down at a table with Republicans and negotiated a bipartisan compromise,” he continued. “But the same Republicans who helped write the thing and were prepared to vote for it suddenly opposed it. Why? Because Donald Trump told them to. Because Donald Trump doesn’t want a solution; he wants a campaign slogan.”
The comments are a sign of how Democrats, once mostly on the defensive on immigration, see the failed border deal as an opportunity to go on the offense against Republicans.
Biden and Trump are both separately touring the border ahead of a potential rematch in November. In their bids to shore up support with weary voters, both Trump and Biden have slammed the other over immigration as the issue has increasingly become a hot topic for voters.
In three of the four early-voting states, Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, immigration topped the economy, abortion, and foreign policy as the most important issue for voters.
Republican lawmakers have continuously pounded Biden over his handling of the “open border” and the increase of immigrants entering the United States illegally. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) claimed Biden’s tour was a “middle finger to middle America.”
Republican lawmakers specifically pointed to the death of 22-year-old University of Georgia student Laken Hope Riley by a Venezuelan immigrant.
Garcia pushed back against the attacks when questioned by the press about Riley’s death, claiming Trump demonizes and dehumanizes immigrants.
“Immigrants actually commit fewer crimes than native-born people here in this country. This immigrant crime narrative is racist. It’s not true,” Garcia said. “Donald Trump is out here saying that we’re poisoning the blood of this country, and the facts actually don’t bear that out.”
Biden announced he would tour the Rio Grande Valley city of Brownsville, Texas, on Thursday and meet with Border Patrol agents after Trump had originally planned a trip to Eagle Pass, Texas, for that same day.
The Trump campaign slammed the visit as a desperate stunt for Biden.
“Crooked Joe Biden has had three years to visit the border and fix the crisis he created,” said Karoline Leavitt, press secretary for the Trump campaign, in a statement. “Now Biden’s handlers are sending him there on the same day as President Trump’s publicly reported trip, not because they actually want to solve the problem, but because they know Biden is losing terribly.”
Biden’s allies, though, claim Trump is unable to solve the immigration crisis that has frustrated leaders on the border and led to several GOP governors sending troops to assist local leaders.
“Donald Trump is going to the border to do what we all know that he does best, which is divide, distract, offend, cause division, and really do nothing to address issues and challenges that we have at the border,” Garcia said. “And certainly not the real issues that are facing the country. So we can expect that he is going to use his racist language, he’s going to spew hate, outrage, division while providing no real plan to fix our broken immigration system.”
Ahead of the visit to the border, Trump’s campaign released an email touting his efforts to secure the southern border, including a 2017 executive order that called for the construction of the wall. Several of Trump’s former presidential primary challengers had criticized him for not completing the wall.
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Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, one of those critics, continued her needling of Trump and Biden by attacking both campaigns over their dueling visits.
“This photo op is too little, too late,” said Haley communications director Nachama Soloveichik in a statement Wednesday. “Nikki Haley has been tackling America’s porous southern border for more than a decade while Joe Biden rolled out the welcome mat for illegal immigrants and Donald Trump demanded Republicans do nothing about it. As usual, there’s a lot of hot air from the fellas and a plan of action from Nikki.”