Migrants waiting to cross the southern border into the US say they want President Biden to win re-election in November, because they fear they would not be allowed into the country if former President Donald Trump regains control of the White House.
“If it’s Trump, it doesn’t matter how much I work or want to work. They won’t let me in,” pipe fitter Richard Betancourt, 46, told The Free Press as he and hundreds of others wait to cross the border at a makeshift encampment in Matamoros, Mexico.
Alejandra Falcon, 26, who has spent the past eight months traveling to the border from Caracas, Venezuela, also said that if Biden “doesn’t win, I can’t imagine what will happen.”
During Trump’s first term in office, he tried to tackle immigration by cutting down on the number of refugees getting green cards and visas and had attempted to build a wall across the border, but wound up deporting fewer undocumented migrants than his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, The Free Press noted.
Soon after he was voted out of office, though, illegal border crossings surged — and reached an all-time high of 2.2 million in 2022, the Washington Post reported.
Nearly 7.3 million migrants have now illegally crossed the southwest border into the US since Biden took office in 2021 — a figure greater than the population of 36 individual states, according to Fox News.
The president vowed in his early days to rescind Title 42, which allowed migrants to be turned away at the border.
They now simply have to claim they have a “credible fear” of returning to their home countries to be let into the US, and are given a ticket to appear in court.
But the migrants may remain in the US for years before their cases are heard in the court system, and may travel throughout the country — making it harder for immigration officials to track them down, according to The Free Press.
On the campaign trail, Trump has hit out at Biden for what he calls a “border bloodbath,” as migrants in major cities continue to commit major crimes.
His efforts have seemed to pay off, with nearly seven in 10 voters saying they disapprove of Biden’s handling of the border in a March AP-NORC poll.
A growing number of voters also expressed concerns in the poll about the number of migrants committing crimes in the US.
In an apparent effort to win back voters, Biden vowed in January to “shut down the border until it could get back under control.”
He was trying at the time to corral Republicans into supporting a bipartisan Senate supplemental spending bill that included money for border security.
But the bill went belly up in the Senate, with Democrats blaming Republicans for wanting to preserve the border issue for the November election.
Now, Biden’s campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez insisted to the Washington Post that “the president doesn’t talk about shutting down the border” and is “not advocating for shutting down the border.”
In a statement to The Post, White House spokesman Andrew Bates said it is “very simple: Joe Biden, the Border Patrol Union, and the Chamber of Commerce are fighting for the toughest, fairest, bipartisan border security deal in history.
“But Congressional Republicans’ stated reason for blocking that historic legislation is that Donald Trump is afraid that making Americans safer would diminish him politically, so they’ve sided with fentanyl traffickers instead.
“The Biden Administration has removed or returned more people in 10 months than any year of the Trump Administration,” Bates claimed.
“And while we do not comment on the 2024 election, non-citizens do not vote.”
