More details about why Biden dismissed his concerns and told him to vote for Trump

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.

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Alligator Ed's picture

By this title is meant that the Democrats have been nothing except blatantly hypocritical when they say allow almost unfettered border crossing, with no penalty but WITH benefits. How could an alien resist? Just let me sneak in while I can--damn, they are building that wall too fast! Yet all they did was throw temporary aid to those detained as "humanitarian relief". Would they engage the Cheeto when he offered Nervous Nancy a temporary deal, which could be adjusted and adopted, until the flow of "Caravans" slowed across the Rio Grande, etc?

Clarrisa-like

Surely this was written in jest for the analogy compares The Cheeto as an earnest man, struggling to achieve virtue, while all round him are those thwarting his attempts. In desperation and disappointment, Trump, love-starved and feeling betrayed, will pine away and die of inanition (look that one up). Not on your fucking life will Trump lay down and die quietly.

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snoopydawg's picture

@Alligator Ed

Democrats have been nothing except blatantly hypocritical when they say allow almost unfettered border crossing, with no penalty but WITH benefits.

Maybe you missed that the D Obama deported 3 million immigrants instead of allowing them to settle here and get benefits? Obama deported more immigrants than any president combined and even Trump hasn't deported that many. Instead he is holding them in deportation camps or sending them back to Mexico to await their hearings. Obama said that he would only deport those that had a criminal record, but more that 56% of them did not have one.

And this:

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.

Or his address to the nation when he advocated sending kids back to the countries they came from? His statement was callous and cruel. I will try to find the video of that later.

I am not advocating for open borders. But our immigration system does need to be fix somehow so that companies can't hire those 'illegal' immigrants without penalties when ICE raids arrest hundreds and people are deported with no thought to what happens to their kids.

D Kamala Harris was behind the bill to allow 300,000 HB1 visas for people to come here and take jobs from Americans. I don't remember what country it was that she was promoting. Niger? India? Don't recall. But I find that just a tad hypocritical.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Alligator Ed's picture

@snoopydawg

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.

Barack Obama "tolerant" of immigrants!

Snoopy, does that statement not seem to you as far-fetched?

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lotlizard's picture

@Alligator Ed  
“Progressives, liberals, lefties — grab ’em by the P-o-C, they’ll let you do anything.”

Access Hollywood versus Excess Wall Street.

Locker room talk versus banker boon actions.

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snoopydawg's picture

@Alligator Ed

Surely this was written in jest for the analogy compares The Cheeto as an earnest man, struggling to achieve virtue,

I have no idea what you are saying here. If you think that I am giving trump a pass for his immigration policies then you are wrong. You must have missed my other essays and comments on Trump.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

That was uncomfortable to watch. Biden should have been booed.

A general observation, not necessarily limited to just Biden: why do these candidates get adversarial when someone challenges them and treat people with such disrespect when the cameras are on? Biden told an Obama voter and volunteer to vote for Trump? And walked away from the man when he was talking? (And didn't he say in the debate that he was the only one who could get people to vote Democrat in the general and in senate races? LOL he just made a free fucking campaign ad for Trump!) I guess I have to catch up emotionally to the reality that since this man is not a huge donor with a lot of power, he doesn't matter to Biden and Biden doesn't care who knows it.

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@Le Frog take your pick. I think it’s as simple as they really believe they are working so hard for the little people and they can’t believe those same people would be so ungrateful as to debate it. They also clearly subscribe to the “where else are you going to go?” school.

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Idolizing a politician is like believing the stripper really likes you.

@Dr. John Carpenter Joe Biden at all? I don't know why I thought Biden would treat that person with a little respect and dignity. Definition of insanity and all that!

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nowhere else to go." So tough shit. AKA Dem establishment campaign slogan "We're not Trump."

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ludwig ii's picture

When Biden advocates right-wing policies, the mental fog lifts and he sounds (relatively) lucid, coherent, present. Politically and morally, this was a horrible thing to say but it's one of the rare times he looked genuinely passionate. When he tries to sound like he's "progressive" he gets tongue-tied and ends up malfunctioning with listen to the record player, go to Joe 30330, President Myboss, etc.

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Not Henry Kissinger's picture

Haven't you heard?

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The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?

and though most people doubt he'll make the nomination he doesn't. He's positioning himself to beat Trump. If Biden goes anti illegal immigrant he'd beat Trump assuming he gets the nomination.

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If Biden gets nominated, I expect to see a constant repetition of the words (said twice, fer cripes sake!) "You should vote for Trump" coming out of Biden's mouth. Trump couldn't have asked for a better soundbite. Biden will complain that it was taken out of context, but that will only make things worse. Consider alternate explanations to, simply, 'people should vote for Trump' (coming from the Democratic nominee's mouth, ha ha).

- Biden said it twice, so it wasn't simply misspeaking. Probably just more evidence of cognitive decline.

- Biden has only contempt for immigration activists.

- Biden has no self-control, or he wouldn't have expressed frustration like that.

- Biden sees all Democratic voters as that person wailing "I got nowhere else to go!" This is, IMO, the worst interpretation of all, and probably the most valid. This is The Lesser Evil policy laid out for all to see. This is what people like Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, and Jill Stein are struggling against, the idea that elections in the U.S. are a binary choice between the two faces of the duopoly. This is why progressives are fighting to take over the Democratic Party. This is why ranked choice voting is so strongly fought against by "establishment" Democrats. And this, IMO, is why so many people have given up voting at all.

Biden is now the LEAST "electable" candidate. But if voters grasp what's really going on here, it will also mean that most other Democratic presidential candidates (Buttigieg, Harris, Klobuchar, Booker, and I would argue, even Warren) will be unelectable, and the Democratic Party still ruled over by corporatists and warmongers will become the least electable party.

EDIT: I should have included that Biden really does think you should vote for Trump - if Sanders is the nominee. It's abundantly clear that Democrats much prefer Republicans to progressives or, (shudder) democratic socialists.

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