With the 2020 Nevada Democratic caucuses only a week away, White House hopefuls are campaigning in the Silver State and making a final pitch to voters. This includes Latinos, who make up a large swath of the Democratic electorate, so immigration policy is one of the top issues being discussed.
Former Vice President Joe Biden , one of the leading contenders in the race, is being grilled over his record on immigration. Per The Washington Examiner , during an interview with Univision, Biden was grilled over his claims that children were not locked in cages under former President Barack Obama .
“At the debate in Houston, you said that during the Obama administration and I quote, ‘We didn’t lock people in cages,’” anchor Jorge Ramos reminded Biden, continuing, “but you actually did — not in the same numbers as the Trump administration, but you did.”
“We found a picture of an 8-year-old boy from Honduras,” Ramos said, “I spoke with the photographer,” the reporter added, noting that the picture was taken in a border detention center in McAllen, Texas, in 2014.
Biden did not immediately push back against Ramos’ suggestion, claiming that unaccompanied children were crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
“We kept them safe and got them out of the detention centers,” the former vice president said, adding that the detention centers were run by Homeland Security.
Ramos pressed further, but Biden insisted that no comparisons can be made between President Donald Trump’s immigration policies and Obama-Biden policies.
According to Biden, during the Obama era, immigrant children were “quickly” reunited with their families or released into safe communities in the United States.
“We sought to get them into safe communities. We sought to get them out of the control of Homeland Security to get them safe. But they came unaccompanied, unaccompanied.”
Trump has argued on several occasions that Obama carried out a number of immigration policies similar to his, suggesting that the former president also separated children from their families and locked them in cages.
According to a fact-check by The Associated Press , this is not entirely true: Immigrant children were not systematically separated from their parents, but they were kept in cages. Furthermore, according to the fact-check, Democrats “routinely and inaccurately” blame the commander-in-chief for constructing “cages” at the border, but they are actually an Obama-era creation.
During the same interview , Biden was also asked about the fact that around 3 million immigrants were deported during the Obama-era, more than under any president in United States history. According to Biden, the deportations were a “big mistake.”
