Biden to court Latino voters at Las Vegas conference

LAS VEGAS — President Joe Biden is trying to shore up support among disenchanted voters critical to his reelection chances by meeting Wednesday with members of a Latino civil rights organization in the battleground state of Nevada.

Biden is scheduled to give a speech at the UnidosUS annual conference in Las Vegas, where he will announce that starting Aug. 19, certain spouses of U.S. citizens without legal status will be able to begin applying for permanent residency, and eventually citizenship, without having to first leave the country. , according to the White House. The new program, first announced by Biden last month, could affect more than half a million immigrants.

Biden is also expected to use the speech to highlight that the Latino unemployment rate is near a record high, that more people in the community have been able to obtain health insurance, and that the federal government has doubled the number of Small Business Administration loans to business owners Latinos. since 2020.

The visit to Latino activists comes as Republicans hold their national convention in Milwaukee and as Biden struggles to steady a re-election campaign that has been on a roll since his dismal performance in the June 27 debate against Republican nominee Donald Trump. The campaign was further complicated by a failed assassination attempt on Trump by a 20-year-old gunman on Saturday in Pennsylvania.

Biden is counting on the strong support of black and Latino voters – two groups that were key parts of his winning coalition in 2020, but whose support has shown signs of eroding – to help him win four more years in the White House.

Biden, in an interview with BET News on Tuesday, insisted he still has plenty of time to energize voters.

“Whether it was young black men, young white men, young Hispanic men or young Asian Americans, they never came together until after Labor Day,” Biden said in the interview. “The idea that they are intensely focused on the election right now doesn’t exist.”

But headwinds for Biden had been mounting even before his failure on the debate stage led to a wave of Democratic lawmakers and donors calling on him to abandon the campaign.

Hispanic Americans now have a less positive view of Biden than when he took office. Forty-five percent of Hispanic adults have a somewhat or very favorable opinion of Biden, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted in June, down from about 6 in 10 in January 2021. In the June poll, half of Hispanic adults had an unfavorable opinion. Biden’s vision.

Biden delivered remarks Tuesday in Las Vegas at the NAACP’s annual convention in which he argued that Trump’s four years in the White House were “hell” for Black Americans. He criticized Trump for his mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic, skyrocketing unemployment at the start of the pandemic and divisive rhetoric that he said needlessly destroyed Americans.

He also mocked Trump for saying that migrants who entered the US under the Democratic administration are stealing “black jobs.”

“I know what a black job is. He is the vice president of the United States,” Biden said about Vice President Kamala Harris. He added that she “could be president.”

Biden also highlighted the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court and her service as vice president under Barack Obama, the country’s first Black president.

The UnidosUS conference gives Biden another opportunity to contrast his approach to immigration with Trump’s. The Republican approach to immigration includes a push for mass deportations and rhetoric that casts migrants as dangerous criminals who “poison the blood” of America.

This new plan from the Biden administration was announced weeks after Biden revealed a widespread crackdown on the U.S.-Mexico border that effectively suspended asylum claims for those arriving between officially designated ports of entry. Immigrant rights groups have sued the Biden administration over that directive, which administration officials say has led to fewer border encounters between ports.

Biden is also expected to sign an executive order establishing a White House initiative to promote opportunities at so-called Hispanic Serving Institutions, a group of about 500 two- and four-year colleges across the country that have prominent Hispanic populations.