Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden on Monday blasted the U.S. president’s policies in Latin America and towards undocumented migrants, saying Donald Trump is "vilifying immigrants to score political points."
In a guest op-ed for the Miami Herald titled "Our Latin America policies are morally bankrupt. Mine reflect American values," former Vice President Biden directly targeted Trump and blamed his administration for an exodus of immigrants and asylum seekers flooding to America's southern borders.
Trump last week threatened the imminent deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants just hours after his State Department confirmed it was cutting off aid to three main source countries for the migrants: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
Florida, where Biden this week is set to debate dozens of other presidential hopefuls, has a large immigrant population, both documented and not, as well as a nearly one-quarter Hispanic/Latino population, many of whom favor a more liberal immigration system.
"It’s clear Trump is only interested in using his policies to assault the dignity of the Latin community and scare voters to turn out on Election Day, while not addressing the real challenges facing our hemisphere," wrote Biden.
Biden said Congress should prioritize the case of "DREAMers" -- undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. at a young age -- in a bid to bring millions out of the shadows through fair treatment and avoiding "ugly threats."
He also criticized Trump’s efforts to repeal Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for nationals from certain countries, claiming such efforts have "injected unnecessary uncertainty into the lives of thousands of families.”
Biden also said Trump's oft-repeated slogan, “Build the wall,” is out of touch with reality, arguing: "It won’t stop the flow of illegal narcotics or human trafficking, both of which come primarily through legal ports of entry.”
Biden said the Obama administration -- in which he served as vice president -- had made progress in addressing the root causes of migrant flows from Central and Latin America until Trump "replaced sound strategy with hostility and inflammatory rhetoric.”
Biden blamed Trump for the "horrifying scenes at the border of kids being kept in cages, tear-gassing asylum seekers, ripping children from their mothers’ arms," saying these actions "subvert American values and erode our ability to lead on the global stage.”
Biden, following controversy last week over his touted ability to work with racist politicians in decades past, remains at the top of the polls to become the Democratic nominee for president for fall 2020.
This week in Miami he will spar with fellow presidential hopefuls in the first Democratic primary debates.
The problem of migrants was created by the U.S. itself, by engineering military and covert operations and also by economic intervention in Central American nations over many decades, an expert on the region argued last week.
Violence and instability in the region instigated by the U.S. has led to large-scale migrations in the region, wrote Carmen Monico of Elon University in the U.S. state of North Carolina on the Conversation website.
She cited how in 1954 the Eisenhower administration's ousting of Guatemala’s democratically elected government ushered in a prolonged civil war. She also told how in the early 1980s, the Reagan administration supported brutal Guatemalan strongman Jose Efrain Rios Montt, who was later convicted of committing genocide.
Monico added that President Ronald Reagan also backed El Salvador’s violent government during a civil war that killed 75,000 people and left the country vulnerable to decades of instability.
"In addition, his administration turned Honduras into a staging ground for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels. The U.S. financed and militarized the country, thus increasing levels of political violence that have never subsided," she wrote.
