"YOU SHOULD VOTE FOR TRUMP" - @JoeBiden.

An immigrant leader confronted Biden in Greenwood, SC about her fear of ICE. She said it's hard for the community to trust him because he defends Obama's deportations.

Then Biden told the Cosecha organizer translating to vote for Trump. pic.twitter.com/A410FSKdiu

— Movimiento Cosecha (@CosechaMovement) November 22, 2019

Why We Confronted Joe Biden on Deportations

Last night, immigrant rights activists asked Joe Biden to repudiate Obama’s immigration record. Biden said no and then told them to “vote for Trump.” Carlos Rojas, one of the activists, talks to Jacobin about why he spoke out — and why we need an immediate moratorium on deportations.

“Every day I live with the fear that ICE will separate my family,” explained immigrant Silvia Morreno, who called upon the former vice president to support a moratorium on deportations through executive action on his first day of office. Biden refused.

Before walking out in protest, her translator, Carlos Rojas, from the immigrant activist organization Movimiento Cosecha, added: “In 2008, I was a volunteer for Obama because I had hope and I believed in the promises that he made to the immigrant community. The fact is that over those eight years, over three million people were deported and separated from families.” Biden’s response: “You should vote for Trump.”

Jacobin’s Eric Blanc spoke with Rojas about why they confronted Biden and what it will take to win full rights for immigrants.

EB People across the country have been sharing the video of your action last night. Can you explain why you decided to challenge Joe Biden?

CR There’s a presidential election unfolding right now where immigration has received a lot of attention.

And the immigration crisis is felt deeply by many people, not only immigrants. We’ve seen record numbers of allies mobilize to express their outrage about children in cages, family separation, and deaths at the border. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets when Trump declared his “zero tolerance” policy.

But sometimes it feels like the American public thinks Trump started this crisis. So we wanted to take this opportunity to remind voters that even under the Obama administration — with Biden as VP — we had a daily immigration crisis, with an average of over a thousand deportations every single day, 3 million in total.

And yesterday was not first time Biden has been asked about this. It’s really concerning to me that Biden continues to embrace Obama as someone who was supposedly a friend of immigrants. I’m terrified when I hear presidential candidates talk only about rolling back Trump’s policies. Just going back to the Obama status quo is completely unacceptable; it would be a betrayal of the immigrant community.

EB Were you surprised by Biden’s response that “you should vote for Trump”?

CR It really shocked me. He actually said it twice; it was a weird answer. Honestly, the first time he said it, I didn’t want to engage, because I thought maybe I had heard him wrong.

We’re calling on the Democratic Party to support the dignity of immigrants — how does it make sense to encourage us to vote for Trump? I think it speaks to how out of touch the Democratic Party establishment is. They take our communities for granted.

After Silvia, an immigrant mother, shared her story about why she couldn’t trust him after Obama’s deportations, Biden’s response was basically, “If you don’t like what we have to offer — even if it’s just bread crumbs — you have to go to Trump.” Obviously we’re not going to do that.

Biden had the opportunity last night to acknowledge that those deportations should not have happened. He could have showed us he understands the pain of immigrants — but instead he defended the Obama legacy. My takeaway from this was: if Biden becomes president, we shouldn’t expect anything different than what we saw under Obama.

History did not start the day Trump became president as too many people like to believe. Oh no. Obama's presidency was not scandal free as people want to believe. That people think it was should be the scandal. Let's look at what happened during Obama's reign of terror on immigrants.

The Democratic Precedent

Democrats would like you to think he came up with it on his own, but Trump’s separation of migrant families is a cruel twist on an Obama-era practice.

The issue of US border control policies suddenly flared up last week, as things tend to do when it comes out that a government has lost nearly 1,500 children and sent some of them into the arms of human traffickers. As always, this was compounded by Trump’s Clarissa-like need to constantly narrate his life to the audience, with his tweet urging his followers to “put pressure on the Democrats to end the horrible law that separates children from there [sic] parents once they cross the Border into the U.S” setting off an added firestorm.

There’s also the recent ACLU report on abuse of migrant children by border patrol officers that turned out to be exclusively focused on the Obama years, which has been conflated with the report on the missing children. Or this widely shared image of immigrant children sleeping in a cage that was actually taken in 2014.

But Obama’s defenders overstate the degree to which this is a departure from norms. Here is a brief list of things the Obama administration did do:

- Arrested tens of thousands of undocumented parents whose kids were US citizens, causing them to lose contact with their children.

- “Disappeared” those parents in the immigration enforcement system, where they were nigh-on impossible to track down, before deporting them to countries they hadn’t lived in for as long as decades.

- Orphaned thousands of kids who were left without a legal guardian when their parents were shunted to another country.

- Sent the parents of those kids to places where there was more than a good chance they’d be kidnapped, tortured, sexually assaulted, killed, or sometimes all of the above.

-Traumatized both the kids left behind and the kids whose parents were undocumented but not yet arrested, which saw those kids develop symptoms of PTSD, stress-based health problems, and night terrors.

In other words, Obama may have never specifically called for migrants to have their kids taken away when crossing the border, but wrenching parents away from their kids — in many cases, permanently — was for many years a regular, known outcome of his policies.

This isn’t even to mention the Alien Transfer and Exit Program (ATEP), began in 2008, but which saw an increase in use under Obama. ATEP was a less extreme precursor to Trump’s current policy, with the same goal: to make crossing the border such an awful, disorienting ordeal that migrants would never try to do so again.

Migrants traveling together would be separated, then shipped off hundreds of miles away to a mystery location, often with no I.D., money, belongings, no way to contact their loved ones or the people they had been traveling with, nor any idea what they would do once they were there. Often, they were sent to places less safe than those they traveled from, making them easy targets for local criminals.

Hundreds of families were separated, typically husbands and wives. Disappearing someone’s husband may not be quite as awful as stealing someone’s children, but you have to wonder when it was decided that one policy was “evil” while the other was acceptable. This was particularly perilous for women, who, after being separated from their traveling companions, were subsequently at much higher risk of sexual assault.

People — mostly immigrant rights groups — spent years shouting into the wind that Obama’s deportation machine was as terrible as it was dangerous. They were roundly ignored, at least until the president needed to win an election. In fact, according to a recent report by the Migration Policy Institute, one of the reasons Trump has failed to deport people at the same clip as Obama is due to the marked increase in local resistance to ICE, resistance that for a variety of reasons was not as forthcoming under a charismatic, tolerant, Democratic president.

So this is the concern Carlos Rojas and his friends had last night when they asked Biden about his immigration policy and why it was so horrible that he just blew them off and sneared that they should vote for Trump instead of him.

This should have been the last straw in ByeDone's gaffe filled campaign, but of course the media will not cover it and will continue propping him up because the democrats would rather Trump win a second term than let Bernie win.