Immigration occupies center stage in the 2024 presidential campaign and also was a major focus during the first presidential debate Thursday night between President Joe Biden and the presumptive GOP nominee, Donald J. Trump.

Immigration is a top issue for voters and for Trump, while the Biden administration has struggled to deal with the largest number of migrant encounters at the southern border in 20 years.

Biden during the 90-minute debate at CNN in Atlanta defended his administration’s handling of immigration and blamed Trump for tanking a bipartisan U.S. Senate border security deal.

Biden and Trump trade insults, accusations of lying in acrimonious presidential debate

Biden also pointed to that deal as a reason he should be reelected, because the White House was able to forge the agreement in the first place.

“We worked very hard to get a bipartisan agreement,” Biden said.

Senate Republicans rejected the bipartisan border security deal earlier this year, siding with their House colleagues and Trump. The agreement would have significantly overhauled U.S. immigration law by creating a temporary procedure to shut down the border during active times and raising the bar for asylum claims.

Trump in the debate argued that Biden did not need legislation to enact policy changes at the southern border because “I didn’t have legislation, I said close the border.”

In early June, Biden made the most drastic crackdown on immigration of his administration, issuing an executive order that instituted a partial ban on asylum proceedings at the southern border.

Trump called that action “insignificant.”

The debate came the day after U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas gave a briefing from Tucson, Arizona, about a decline in migrant encounters following Biden’s executive order.

He said the Tucson sector has “seen a more than 45 percent drop in U.S. Border Patrol encounters since the president took action, and repatriations of encountered individuals in Tucson have increased by nearly 150 percent.”

“Across the entire southern border, Border Patrol encounters have dropped by over 40 percent,” Mayorkas said.

‘Remain in Mexico’ policy

Trump cited his prior policies that he felt were successful and criticized Biden for rolling them back, such as one that required migrants to remain in Mexico while they awaited their asylum cases.

Biden slammed Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy that separated parents from their children in efforts to deter unauthorized immigrants at the border.

“When he was president he was … separating babies from their mothers and putting them in cages,” Biden said.

And, without citing evidence, Trump blamed immigrants for crime, calling it “migrant crime.”

Overall violent crime in the country is down by 15%, according to recent FBI statistics, and researchers have found that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S. citizens.

Trump brought up the death of a Georgia nursing student, Laken Riley, and blamed Biden’s immigration policies.

“All he does is make our country unsafe,” Trump said.

In late February, Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student at Augusta University, was reported missing by her roommate when she did not return home after a run on the campus of the University of Georgia at Athens.

Local police found her body and shortly afterward arrested a 26-year-old man from Venezuela for her murder — an immigrant previously arrested in Georgia on a shoplifting charge who entered the country without authorization in 2022, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. U.S. House Republicans in reaction passed the Laken Riley Act.

Trump was asked by debate moderators how he would carry out mass deportations, but he did not go into detail.

He has repeatedly claimed he would carry out a mass deportation campaign of undocumented immigrants by utilizing local law enforcement, the National Guard and potentially the U.S. military. He’s done so on the campaign trail and during a lengthy interview with Time Magazine. 

“We have to get a lot of these people out and we got to get them out fast because they’re destroying our country,” Trump said during the debate.