Former President Donald Trump and his friends are pushing a new round of xenophobic lies to try to smear President Joe Biden's push to keep families together, wrote The New Republic's Greg Sargent on Tuesday.
Fresh off his executive action implementing more controls to secure the border, Biden followed up this week with an order reforming the residency process for undocumented immigrants married to U.S. citizens. Federal law already allows these immigrants to apply for green cards, but Biden's order simplifies the bureaucratic process, making it much easier for an estimated 550,000 people to gain legal status.
Trump and his allies, though, responded by trying to tie Biden's policy to brutal rapes and murders allegedly committed by migrants — including the killing of a young woman in Maryland. The former president and sympathetic presenters doubled down on these attacks at a garbled rally in Racine, Wisconsin on Monday evening.
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But these "truly vile smears" are nonsense, wrote Sargent.
"There's a key tell in the Fox/MAGA attacks on Biden's policy: They all try to change the subject back to *the border.* Yet this policy is all about immigrants who have lived here for a decade or more," wrote Sargent. "This is ugly stuff. Fox/MAGA personalities are linking Biden's policy to a horrific murder. RNC says the killing was done by a 'BIDEN ILLEGAL.' Fox is juxtaposing the new policy with footage of hordes swarming the border and even migrant mug shots."
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The problem, he wrote, is that Biden's order only applies to "500,000 people who have lived in the US for at least a decade, are married to Americans, have deep roots in communities across the country, and in many cases are *raising American children.*" And in any case, "the undocumented spouses of US citizens are already allowed to apply for green cards. Biden's move just allows them to remain here while they access that process, rather than leave the country first."
"It's revealing that Fox/MAGA are responding to Biden's move by screaming 'LOOK OVER THERE AT THE BORDER!!!' They can't allow the focus to be on longtime immigrant residents, who are deeply integrated into US life and are widely viewed sympathetically," wrote Sargent. Biden, he concluded, is rightly trying to shift the focus away from an obsession with the border, and onto "making immigration/integration easier in orderly ways."
