Biden campaign rips Trump’s Time interview: ‘We can’t go back’

Biden 2024 campaign co-chair Rep. Verónica Escobar (D-Texas) criticized former President Trump for his comments on immigration in a Time magazine interview published Tuesday, during which he promised mass deportations if he returned to the country. power.

In the interview, Trump repeated several falsehoods that have become a staple of his campaign speech, including exaggerated crime rates among immigrants and the number of undocumented immigrants in the country.

“Trump repeating troubling and dangerous rhetoric goes against the very fabric of who we are as a nation. He is not just pledging to reimplement the cruel and systematic policies of alienating mothers from their children since his term in office – he is pledging to go further, using the military and law enforcement to enact his cruel, un-American and ineffective. policies,” Escobar said in a statement obtained exclusively by The Hill.

Escobar was reacting to Trump’s pledge to use local law enforcement and the National Guard to strictly enforce immigration laws, at one point praising former President Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback,” though not by name.

“Dwight Eisenhower was a strong supporter of illegal immigration that did not enter our country. And he carried out a massive deportation of people. He had been doing this for a long time. He became very proficient at it,” Trump told the magazine.

Trump escalated his threat to use the military, telling Time magazine that undocumented immigrants are “not civilians,” and repeating the rhetoric of an “invasion,” and using a dog whistle referring to the migrants as men of “fighting age.”

This descriptor, sometimes also called “military age,” iscommon in right-wing mediaand among Republican Party immigration hardliners, and purports to suggest that the migrants are potentially disguised members of adversarial foreign military groups, a claim for which there is no evidence.

Escobar criticized Trump for this type of rhetoric, highlighting the 2019 El Paso shooting where a gunman who expressed anti-Mexican sentiment as his primary motivation killed 23 people and injured 22 others.

“I saw the terrible consequences of his language and policies firsthand during my first term in Congress: my community fell victim to his ongoing and consistent xenophobic rhetoric when a white supremacist – who published a statement online using Trump’s own words – massacred Latinos in El Salvador. Paso on August 3, 2019. We cannot go back,” said Escobar.

Trump also downplayed the need for new detention camps to house immigrants slated for deportation — though he did not explicitly rule out the possibility — saying “there wouldn’t be as much need for [camps], due to the fact that we will move them. Let’s bring them back to where they came from.”

Repatriations of foreign nationals are limited by a number of factors, including limited resources to conduct deportation flights and whether other countries will accept such flights.

Venezuela, for example, currently does not accept removal flights from the United States and is a major source country for people on the move.

Along with the interview, Time publisheda long fact checkof Trump’s statements, rejecting his statements about the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States and the definition of “civilian”, among others.

“The American people will not tolerate Trump’s attacks on immigrants; on mothers; and on children. They want solutions at our border, not more sick political maneuvers that come at the expense of the most vulnerable and with an embrace of authoritarianism. The report Today’s TIME issue only highlights what is at stake in this election: we must work to re-elect President Biden and Vice President Harris,” Escobar said.

Biden’s team also sharply criticized Trump’s comments on abortion in the Time interview, including saying it should be up to states to decide whether or not to monitor women’s pregnancies or prosecute them for having an abortion.

“I think they can do it. Again, you’re going to have to talk to each state,” Trump said.

This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story