The Trump administration’s policy platform has not earned it many prominent supporters outside of the Republican Party. Proposals including walling off an entire country and the actual implementation of policies like separation of immigrant families aren’t items that broad bipartisan agreement can be expected on.
One detractor is the United States’ most recent vice president, Joe Biden. Speaking Friday night in Phoenix, Arizona, at the national convention of the League of United Latin American Citizens, he lambasted the Trump administration’s immigration policy decisions as contrary to the basics of humanity, calling them an “assault on our dignity.”
He pointed out that their policies have no real basis in reality, saying:
‘Grotesque lies — lies about immigrants, about crime, about costs to the community. They’re simply lies — factually inaccurate. And look folks, this administration’s policies that literally rip babies from the arms of their mothers and fathers — one of the darkest moments in our history.’
Separation of immigrant families at the border was instituted as a part of a “zero tolerance” policy that has seen the Trump administration seek to prosecute undocumented attempted border crossers to the fullest extent of the law. Crossing the border without proper documentation for the first time is a criminal misdemeanor that is hardly representative of someone seeking to cause harm to the United States.
Yet, even still, Trump holds fast to his claim that undocumented immigrant groups are hotbeds for criminal activity, despite the fact that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than individuals who were actually born here. That claim from Trump, as Joe Biden pointed out, is simply a lie — a lie that’s been used to justify the separation of thousands of children from their parents. Only about 450 of the children had been reunited with their families as of Friday in the face of a court order for the reunifications.
Biden puts these family separations on the same level as the darkest things imaginable from American history, including, perhaps, Japanese internment camps during the World War II era and societally entrenched enslavement of African Americans. During the slave era, too, children were separated from their parents. That is not the direction that the United States — or any country — should be going.
Biden sees evidence of a reversal of broad principles of human rights in other issues besides the family separations.
He continued:
‘It doesn’t just reveal itself in the betrayal of the Dreamers or the pardoning of a sheriff who has terrorized the community. It is also in the underfunding of our schools, and the attacks on labor, and the ability of workers to bargain for their own worth.’
Indeed, rather than taking on respect for the issues Biden mentions, the Trump administration’s priorities still include immigration policy changes like the construction of a border wall in between the country and Mexico.
Trump’s modus operandi is to lie, lie, and lie again while ignoring issues that he should be taking on as president and sticking to policies like harsh crackdowns on immigrants. He’s claimed that Biden’s party could have done something about the family separations sooner, but they’re not the ones currently in control of Congress — for now.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
