Politics
Trump wants mass deportations. Can Biden sell a more nuanced approach during the debate?
When President Biden and former President Trump take the stage in Atlanta on Thursday, immigration and the humanitarian crisis at the southern border will almost certainly be a flashpoint.
Many polls show that voters believe Trump is best positioned to address the issue, and he has continuously slammed Biden on it. He has blamed his successor’s policies for the crisis, and filled his social media feeds with missives about crimes allegedly committed by immigrants, referring to them as “Biden Migrant Killings.” He has vowed to deport millions of immigrants who are in the country without legal authorization.
Trump has referred to migrants as “animals” and even suggested they should be turned into mixed martial arts combatants.
“I said, ‘Dana, I have an idea for you to make a lot of money. You’re going to go and start a new migrant fight league, only migrants,’” Trump said before an evangelical Christian conference in Washington, D.C., last weekend, referring to Dana White, head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
Such comments have scored Trump points with his base and beyond.
Biden faces a trickier challenge, allies and advisors say, and needs to hone in on a nuanced message Thursday night that emphasizes the balance between the need for border security and humanity for immigrants who already have entered this country.
“I don’t think it’s an either-or and I don’t think the American public thinks it’s an either-or,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) told The Times this week. “We can and should do both.”
He said Thursday night’s debate will exemplify how “Joe Biden speaks to American people. Donald Trump speaks to his base.”
Matt A. Barreto, a Biden campaign pollster, said an April poll he oversaw found that two-thirds of respondents in key battleground states want “a balanced approach to the immigration system and report high levels of support for policies addressing both border security and paths to citizenship.”
“This is what the president is pushing for and the polling data suggests that’s what the American public wants,” Barreto told The Times. “They want to see a well managed orderly border and they also have tremendous empathy for long-term undocumented immigrants and they want to see them brought out of the shadows.”
Biden has made two moves recently that reflect this balancing act, imposing limits on asylum seekers and clearing a path to citizenship for undocumented spouses of American citizens.
For the third month in a row, respondents to an April Gallup poll cited immigration as the most important problem facing the United States. A recent Washington Post-Schar School of Policy and Government poll of swing state voters found that just 42% of respondents said immigrants who are in the country illegally should be deported. Nearly 60% said they should be offered the chance to apply for legal status.
Still, Trump’s handling of immigration is preferred to Biden’s, 52% to 26%, according to the same poll.
During the debate, Trump is likely to bring up serious crimes allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants.
In one instance, two men from Venezuela who entered the U.S. illegally earlier this year were charged in connection with the death of a 12-year-old girl in Houston. “We have a new Biden Migrant Killing — It’s only going to get worse, and it’s all Crooked Joe Biden’s fault,” Trump said on Truth Social.
But immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the U.S., studies show. The Times reported earlier this year that Trump was fundraising with Thomas Homan, a former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement who helped implement the widely derided family separation policy.
In response, Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said, “Biden’s reversal of President Trump’s immigration policies has created an unprecedented and illegal immigration, humanitarian and national security crisis on our southern border.”
Leavitt said that if Trump returns to the Oval Office, “he will restore all of his prior policies, implement brand new crackdowns that will send shock waves to all the world’s criminal smugglers, and marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation in American history.”
In recent weeks Trump has appeared to modulate, saying on a podcast that immigrants who graduate from American colleges should get a green card. The comments prompted fierce pushback from his allies.
His spokesperson then clarified that not all graduates would be getting green cards, saying it “would only apply to the most thoroughly vetted college graduates who would never undercut American wages or workers.”
Earlier this year, House Republicans heeded Trump’s demands and killed a bipartisan border security bill after months of negotiations in the Senate. The negotiations also exposed divisions among Democrats and reflected the two notes Biden will need to hit Thursday: How to speak to voters who think the southern border is too porous while also emphasizing the contributions of immigrants already in the country.
Pedro Rios of the American Friends Service Committee talks with asylum seekers at the border near San Diego in June.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
“Every American should know that Trump proudly killed the strongest bipartisan border bill in a generation — siding with fentanyl traffickers over the Border Patrol and our security,” said campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz, hinting at an avenue of attack Biden might utilize Thursday.
Padilla opposed the winter compromise because it didn’t include reforms to aid farmworkers and undocumented immigrants already in the country. Biden at the time said he would have signed the deal but it never made it to his desk primarily because of Trump’s opposition.
Even though he didn’t like the deal, Padilla said Biden has done a good job through executive orders and public pronouncements aimed at both securing the southern border and helping people already here. Padilla pointed to a recent executive order that would protect immigrant spouses of U.S. citizens who have lived consecutively in the country for at least a decade. The move allows as many as 500,000 of those immigrants to quickly access a pathway to U.S. citizenship.
Unlike Padilla, Rep. Greg Stanton (D-Ariz.) supported the Senate compromise deal. The former Phoenix mayor viewed it as a good start that immediately spoke to the frustrations of his constituents and would’ve “reestablished operational control” of the border. Stanton has frequently traveled to border stations and ports of entry — often with Republicans — and said that what he has witnessed is unsustainable.
Earlier this month, the Biden administration raised the legal standard for asylum claims and restricted access to asylum for those crossing the border illegally when arrests average higher than 2,500 a day, as has been common.
The change is hampered without additional funding, which the border bill would have provided, administration officials point out. Mexico has agreed to accept migrants from certain other countries, such as Venezuela and Cuba, allowing some to be quickly removed from the U.S. But officials can’t rely on the consistent cooperation of other countries, such as China, to take their citizens back.
Still, after record high arrests at the end of last year, Border Patrol said preliminary data since Biden’s announcement showed arrests had fallen by 25%.
May figures show arrests fell to the third-lowest of any month throughout his presidency.
Customs and Border Protection reported that agents recovered 895 remains of migrants in fiscal year 2022, three times as many as were discovered in 2018. Advocates say the number is a vast undercount.
Stanton said the debate is a moment where Biden can point to these accomplishments and lay out how Republican intransigency has torpedoed any efforts to get more durable fixes. Stanton was at the signing ceremony for Biden’s executive order where he highlighted the work of a formerly undocumented nurse who helped COVID-19 patients during the pandemic. The nurse had benefited from Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.
“Biden understands the fundamentals of saying you need strong border security and appropriate immigration, smart immigration reform,” Stanton said. “Those have always gone together.”
Times staff writer Andrea Castillo contributed to this report.
The re-election campaign for President Biden says it has raised a whopping $27 million since his rocky debate performance against former President Trump.
From the day of the debate through Friday evening, the Biden-Harris campaign told Fox News that it had raised $27 million.
The updated figure comes after the campaign said on Friday that it raised $14 million in “a sign of strength of our grassroots support” on debate day and the morning after.
The campaign also noted Friday that 11 p.m. to 12 p.m. on Thursday – the first hour after the debate – was the single best hour of fundraising since the campaign’s launch in April 2023.
BIDEN AIMS TO CHANGE NEGATIVE NARRATIVE AFTER ROUGH DEBATE WITH TRUMP
The re-election campaign for President Biden says it has raised $27 million since his rocky debate performance against former President Trump. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP)
The large sums of cash come as Biden’s campaign seeks to address Democratic Party panic over whether he is mentally fit to serve as president following his disastrous faceoff with Trump in Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday.
“I know I’m not a young man, to state the obvious,” Biden, who at 81 is the oldest president in the nation’s history, told cheering supporters at a Friday afternoon rally in the crucial battleground state of North Carolina.
“Folks, I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to,” Biden acknowledged. “But I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong. And I know how to do this job. I know how to get things done. And I know, like millions of Americans know, when you get knocked down you get back up.”
The president, pointing to his 2024 rematch with Trump, emphasized, “I would not be running again if I did not believe with all my heart and soul that I can do this job.”
Struggling with a raspy voice and delivering rambling answers, Biden struggled during portions of the debate. Several political analysts noted, however, that the president sharpened his answers as the debate progressed.
HERITAGE FOUNDATION WORKING ON ELECTION LEGAL CHALLENGES IN CASE BIDEN PULLED FROM DNC NOMINATION
President Biden participates in the CNN Presidential Debate on June 27, 2024, in Atlanta, Georgia. (Andrew Harnik)
Biden’s uneven and, at times, halting performance grabbed the vast majority of headlines from the debate and sparked a new round of calls from political pundits, publications and some Democrats for the president to step aside as the party’s standard-bearer.
Top Biden allies have pushed back against such talk as they defended the president and targeted Trump for “lying” throughout the debate.
Two Democratic sources confirmed to Fox News that top Biden campaign officials worked to calm concerns and fears as they huddled privately on Friday at a previously scheduled meeting with top party donors.
“Biden‘s record grassroots fundraising from the day of the debate is critical. It helps blunt the criticism from Biden’s performance,” veteran political strategist and Democratic National Committee member Maria Cardona told Fox News.
Cardona, a top Biden supporter, said spotlighting the fundraising “reminds Democrats that there is enthusiasm for the president and urgency to make sure that the liar and criminal Donald Trump doesn’t get close to the Oval Office.”
Another Democratic strategist and presidential campaign veteran said that team Biden’s focus on fundraising “is their best and maybe their only card to play.”
Trump campaign senior adviser Brian Hughes discounted the Biden fundraising.
President Biden and former President Trump debated on Thursday night in Atlanta, Georgia. (Getty Images)
“As of last week, the Biden campaign has spent $100 million on cable, TV and radio. They’ve spent money on a bloated organization. Yet President Trump’s lead has grown in battleground states, and now we see polling and enthusiasm on the ground putting Virginia and Minnesota in play for the GOP nominee for the first time in many election cycles,” Hughes told Fox News.
The Trump campaign – enjoying the post-debate narrative – had no need to immediately emphasize its own fundraising, but told Fox News Friday afternoon it brought in $8 million the day of the debate.
President Biden’s widely panned debate performance Thursday night in Atlanta has many prominent Democrats asking a simple question:
What do we do now?
Swapping out Biden for someone else is likely not possible — unless he quits the race himself. He’s won the requisite number of delegates to capture the Democratic nomination, and Biden said Friday at a rally that he was in the race to win. So now strategists and donors are mulling how the 81-year-old can reset his campaign and take the fight to former President Trump.
Some said the president needed to take a moment to survey the damage. Others said it was important that he increase his campaign travel schedule, do more media availabilities and emphasize how he’s always been an underdog. Some added that he needed to acknowledge his years and what Father Time has wrought rather than act as though age weren’t an issue.
Finally, there was broad agreement that Biden needs to home in on a message that contrasts his values and those of Trump, whom they describe as vain and vindictive.
“Bad debate nights happen,” former President Obama wrote on X. “Trust me, I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself.”
Biden missed a chance to hit that note Thursday, several strategists said. They had wanted him to pick an issue such as reproductive rights or the economy, for example, and stay far more focused on how Americans would be worse off if Trump returned to the White House. They want him to do the same moving forward.
The president’s campaign “definitely needs more to offer clarity on the larger message they’re trying to convey with respect to Trump and how horrible he is,” Democratic strategist Bill Carrick said.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) said Biden remained best positioned to lead the Democratic Party and that his past ability to overcome setbacks, tragedy and adversity offers a guide for how he should approach this moment.
Khanna, a frequent Biden surrogate on the campaign trail, suggested that the president stage a rally on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art to evoke the image of Sylvester Stallone running up them in the iconic moment from the movie “Rocky.”
Biden has always styled himself as an underdog, and that shouldn’t change now, Khanna said. Thursday night’s debate was not Biden’s best showing, the congressman said, but doesn’t define him.
“Rocky wasn’t the most eloquent, but he was a fighter, and his eloquence was his character. I think that’s the line that we need to use: that Biden’s eloquence is his character,” Khanna told The Times.
“He needs to embrace the role of an underdog. He needs to embrace his role as having gotten knocked down in life and gotten back up,” Khanna said. “He’s not going to be a John F. Kennedy. He’s not going to be an Obama. He’s not going to be a Reagan. But he can be a Truman. He can be a Johnson. He can be a fighter.”
Being out among Americans right now is essential, Khanna added, suggesting that Biden barnstorm through the Midwest and meet with blue-collar workers and small-business owners.
Biden has done very few sit-down interviews or news conferences since taking office. He skipped the traditional Super Bowl halftime interview this year. In his first three years in office, Biden held 33 news conferences — half as many as Obama and fewer than Trump’s 52 over the same period, according to The American Presidency Project at UC Santa Barbara.
A patron watches President Biden debate former President Trump during a watch party Thursday in Scottsdale, Ariz.
(Ross D. Franklin / Associated Press)
On Thursday night, the reviews of President Biden flowing in after the 90-minute were generally bad, with one accompanied by seven head-exploding emojis. Even allies have acknowledged he appeared off his A-Game.
It was “Bad night for Trump — but worse night for Biden,” Christine Pelosi, a Democratic National Committee delegate and daughter of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said in a text message.
Biden “needs a course correct and a timely, long unscripted interview to show that this was a terrible debate — as Obama and Reagan both had with their first re-elect debates — and not an ongoing condition,” she said.
One surprising element about Biden’s performance Thursday was how it differed from his energetic and forceful State of the Union Address in March. Biden was so strong that Trump and other Republicans suggested the president had been “jacked up” on drugs to perform so well.
But in the debate, Biden sounded hoarse and and at times struggled to complete sentences. Trump also spoke incoherently at times and, as fact-checkers pointed out, lied repeatedly. But Trump also spoke with more confidence, and the contrast in energy — Trump revved up, Biden halting — was startling to many viewers.
CNN announced that the debate averaged 51.3 million television viewers Thursday. The data do not include online viewing.
“I am very fond of ‘Joey Biden.’ But I believe he may well have done himself and those of us who understand what an effective president he has been existential damage,” said Joey Kaempfer, a real estate developer who has donated heavily to Democrats through the years. He has given close to $1 million to groups supporting Biden’s reelection and has dined with the president.
“We must be patient and see how the next week or two shakes out,” he said. “But yes, I am very concerned.”
At a rally Friday in North Carolina, Biden appeared to heed some of this advice, particularly from those who said he needed to more fulsomely address the fact that he’d be the oldest president in history by the end of his second term. He delivered his points with more gusto and clarity than the night before and sounded more cogent.
Biden continued to attack the lies and lack of empathy Trump espoused at the debate — pointing to his comments on abortion, immigration and respecting democracy — and contrasting them with the accomplishments of his administration’s first term. He also addressed his age.
“I know I’m not a young man, to state the obvious,” Biden said Friday. “I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly. I don’t debate as well as I used to. But I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong, and I know how to do this job.
“I know, like millions of Americans know,” he said, “when you get knocked down, you get back up.”
Biden at one point trumpeted his relationships with every world leader, “because I’ve been around, as you kind [of] have noticed,” which prompted laughs from the crowd. Exuding energy and not being defensive appeared to endear him to the supporters, and would it put him on a good path forward after the disastrous debate.
“Even with a great speech today — which I think is a good start — he needs many, many, of those, and he needs many many surrogates in the course of this,” former Republican strategist Matthew Dowd said on MSNBC.
There are 75 days until the next debate, he added, which means it will be a long time before many people tune into politics again. That’s a problem for Biden, Dowd said.
As if to address concerns about his stamina, Biden also attended two events Friday in New York City. The Associated Press reported that he joined Elton John in inaugurating a visitor center at the Stonewall National Monument, then attended a Pride Month fundraiser.
President Biden listens as Elton John speaks Friday at the grand opening ceremony for the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center in New York City’s Greenwich Village.
(Julia Nikhinson / Associated Press)
This was one of the earliest presidential debates in recent political history. Many analysts said it would focus voters’ attention on the race earlier and offer Biden a chance to shake up the trajectory.
Analysts had theorized that the Biden campaign also wanted an early debate because it would give him more time to repair any damage from a poor outing. That will now be put to the test.
Times staff writers Seema Mehta and Noah Bierman contributed to this report.
President Biden, on the day after the most consequential political performance of his decades-long career, aimed to address Democratic Party panic after his disastrous debate performance in his first faceoff with former President Trump.
“I know I’m not a young man, to state the obvious,” Biden, who at 81 is the oldest president in the nation’s history, told cheering supporters at a Friday afternoon rally in the crucial battleground state of North Carolina.
“Folks, I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to,” Biden acknowledged. “But I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong. And I know how to do this job. I know how to get things done. And I know, like millions of Americans know, when you get knocked down you get back up.”
And the president, pointing to his 2024 rematch with Trump, emphasized, “I would not be running again if I did not believe with all my heart and soul that I can do this job.”
A RASPY BIDEN DELIVERS A HALTING DEBATE PERFORMANCE IN SHOWDOWN WITH TRUMP
President Biden speaks at a post-debate campaign rally June 28, 2024, in Raleigh, N.C. (Allison Joyce/Getty Images)
As Biden worked to calm his party, his campaign repeatedly highlighted what it described as record-breaking fundraising both during and after the debate as it seemingly aimed to deflect from a brutal narrative coming out of the showdown in Atlanta.
WHAT THE NEW YORK TIMES IS ASKING BIDEN TO DO
And Biden’s campaign on Friday morning announced that it hauled in $14 million in fundraising Thursday and Friday morning, which it highlighted as “a sign of strength of our grassroots support.”
Struggling with a raspy voice and delivering rambling answers, Biden struggled during portions of the debate. The president did sharpen his answers as the debate progressed, calling out his Republican predecessor in the White House for numerous falsehoods throughout the 90-minute debate.
President Biden (right) and former President Trump participate in the CNN Presidential Debate in Atlanta. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
But Biden’s uneven and, at times, halting performance grabbed the vast majority of headlines from the debate and sparked a new round of calls from political pundits and publications and some Democrats for the president to step aside as the party’s standard-bearer. Top Biden allies pushed back against such talk as they defended the president and targeted Trump for lying throughout the debate.
And the Biden campaign spotlighted that the 11 p.m. ET hour Thursday night — the one hour after the debate — “was the single best hour of fundraising since the campaign’s launch in April 2023.”
WHAT BIDEN SAID AT HIS FIRST POST-DEBATE RALLY
A Biden campaign adviser, who asked to remain anonymous to speak more freely, told Fox News the fundraising is “an important sign that there’s a bit of disconnect between national narratives and where supporters are.”
Following his rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, the president and first lady Jill Biden traveled to New York City, where they joined superstars Elton John and Katy Perry and top Democratic Party elected officials to unveil the city’s Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center. The grand opening was timed to kick off New York City’s Pride weekend and mark the 55th anniversary of the historic rebellion that marked a turning point for LGBTQ+liberation.
President Biden speaks during the grand-opening ceremony for the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center Friday, June 28, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Julia Nikhinson)
Biden then headlined a campaign fundraiser Friday evening in New York City that his campaign touted was “the largest LGBTQ fundraising event in political history.”
On Saturday, the president was scheduled to attend two more top dollar fundraisers in the wealthy communities of East Hampton, New York, and Red Bank, New Jersey.
“Biden‘s record grassroots fundraising from the day of the debate is critical. It helps blunt the criticism from Biden’s performance,” veteran political strategist and Democratic National Committee member Maria Cardona told Fox News.
Cardona, a top Biden supporter, said spotlighting the fundraising “reminds Democrats that there is enthusiasm for the president and urgency to make sure that the liar and criminal Donald Trump doesn’t get close to the Oval Office.”
A Democratic strategist and presidential campaign veteran said team Biden’s focus on fundraising “is their best and maybe their only card to play.”
But the strategist, who was granted anonymity to speak more freely, emphasized “there’s no amount of money that can reverse the damage that was done at the debate and the president confirming everyone’s worst suspicions and fears about him and his age and not being up to the job. Period.”
But Trump campaign senior adviser Brian Hughes discounted the fundraising.
“As of last week, the Biden campaign has spent $100 million on cable, TV and radio. They’ve spent money on a bloated organization. Yet President Trump’s lead has grown in battleground states, and now we see polling and enthusiasm on the ground putting Virginia and Minnesota in play for the GOP nominee for the first time in many election cycles,” Hughes told Fox News.
The Trump campaign, enjoying the post-debate narrative, had no need to immediately emphasize its own fundraising.
But the campaign told Fox News Friday afternoon it brought in $8 million the day of the debate.
Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley, a top Trump ally, said hours earlier in an interview on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” that “the donations have been coming in, very strong, very steady. And that’s because the people saw his positioning last night during the debate. The donations, especially the small dollar online donations that we’re getting in right now, are really a reflection of the enthusiasm that the president brings to the campaign.”
And Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita told Fox News Digital Thursday night the debate performance was “added rocket fuel” to the former president’s fundraising and in “motivating the troops.”
Dan Eberhart, an oil drilling CEO and a prominent Republican donor, is raising money for Trump after earlier supporting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the GOP presidential nomination race.
“The donors I have texted with are now more confident of a Trump win,” Eberhart said. “For any donors that were still on the sideline, last night was the push they needed to put their chips on Trump.”
Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more at our Fox News Digital election hub.
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