President Biden’s reelection campaign unveiled a bilingual video Saturday, attacking former President Trump for his aversion to the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy — a 2012 program that protects immigrants who came to the U.S. as children from deportation.
The video, titled “Here to Stay,” features clips from DACA recipients — more commonly known as “Dreamers” — who address the former president by name in a mixture of Spanish and English. The participants hit Trump over his rhetoric against immigrants and laud the Biden administration’s moves to protect them.
“Joe Biden has a track record of protecting Dreamers like me,” one recipient, who identified himself as Mario, said in the 49-second video, which was unveiled on the 12th anniversary of the DACA program. Another participant, named Maria, also lauded Biden and Vice President Harris’s commitment to protecting the policy, including the administration’s move to expand health care eligibility under the Affordable Care Act to DACA recipients earlier this year.
They also called out Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, for trying to separate the “Dreamers” and accused him of “demonizing” immigrants.
The clip also features a quick sound bite of the former president claiming migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” His continued use of the phrase has drawn scrutiny for its connection to Nazi Germany.
Trump has for years used incendiary rhetoric about immigrants to fire up his base, but in recent weeks, he has turned up the intensity even more, warning about “migrant crime” — a category the former president said he branded himself to refer to violence by those who came into the country illegally. He has also threatened mass deportations if reelected in the fall.
In response, the participants urged voters to put their support behind Biden in November.
The Biden-Harris campaign also dropped a new ad Saturday, called “Standing with Dreamers,” featuring the vice president’s renewed vow to fight for DACA.
A spokesperson for the Biden-Harris campaign said in a statement that the administration will continue their work to fortify the program.
“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will never stop fighting for Dreamers, as they have proven time after time,” Campaign Manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez wrote Friday. “Dreamers are essential to the fabric of our country and America is their home.”
“Trump on the other hand is doubling down on authoritarianism, embracing racists like Joe Arpaio, and is promising to end DACA, separate families and institute mass detention camps for immigrants,” she continued. “Trump will do anything to benefit himself and his corporate allies and nothing to improve the lives of the American people.”
Chavez added that the American people “deserve a president who’s focused on delivering solutions for them and their families — only Joe Biden is that president.”
During a rally in Phoenix last week, the former president was seen with ex-Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who the Biden campaign has labeled “America’s most infamous racist sheriff.” The campaign launched a quick-hit ad against Trump following the encounter with the former law enforcement official, who is deeply unpopular with Latinos.