Q: You indicated that you thought unauthorized border crossings should be decriminalized during a 2019 debate. You were put in charge of finding and solving the root causes of illegal immigration by Biden, but the unauthorized crossings only got worse. You and Biden only implemented tough and successful regulations a few months before the election. Why should Americans trust you on this issue?
A: We need to put this in historical context. You will recall that Trump’s solution to the border issue was extreme cruelty, including the family separation policy. That caused the Democratic Party to lurch to the left on immigration issues. Only Joe Biden resisted that. I got caught up in it because I thought that’s where the votes were in the primary. I changed my position once I became part of the Democratic ticket.
When Joe and I took office, we were determined to implement a policy that was tough, orderly, and humane, as opposed to Trump, who was just cruel. I was tasked with the job of dealing with Central American leaders to reduce immigration from their countries. I was successful; that isn’t where the problem is now.
A number of things happened to make our job more difficult. First of all, we started seeing masses of immigrants from different countries that were experiencing political instability, such as Venezuela. The instability there is to some extent on the hands of Trump and the GOP. Second, Title 42, the primary way in which Trump was regulating border crossings, became unenforceable due to the end of the pandemic. Third, we were sued by a number of pro-immigrant groups who argued that we were just as bad as Trump; they had some success in court. Finally, the system was grossly underfunded, but Congress refused to help.
We ultimately worked with Republicans to come up with a bipartisan bill that would properly fund the system and give us legal remedies to some loopholes in the system. Trump succeeded in killing the bill because he wanted to run on the issue, not solve it. We then adopted regulations that incorporated a lot of the ideas in the bill. It would have been better to do that by legislation, because we know the regulations are vulnerable to legal challenge. As long as the judicial system doesn’t overturn those regulations, however, the system is working.
In the end, the American public has to make a choice. Trump’s plan to use the military and local officials to undertake massive raids, and to build huge deportation camps, is probably illegal and certainly un-American. Is that what we as a country want? Do we want cruelty to replace sensible policy? That will be up to the voters.