Biden lays down some immigration bait for Trump

President Joe Biden on Tuesday unveiled major new actions that his aides and allies hope will galvanize voters disillusioned with the rightward drift of his approach to immigration.

But in issuing a new policy granting legal protections to undocumented spouses and children of American citizens, the president was trying to lure Donald Trump into a very specific debate, too.

Inside Biden’s team, advisers are betting that the new policies, unveiled at the White House on Tuesday, will reignite a larger conversation about one of the most controversial chapters of the Trump era: the separation of families on the southern border.

Biden aides and surrogates are expected to branch out nationally in the coming days to both draw that contrast and sell his new policies, which are expected to grant protections from deportation for 550,000 undocumented people in the country and provide work permits for other undocumented residents. They have pinpointed two swing states — Arizona and Nevada — as places where they believe the policies will resonate with Latino voters vital to the president’s reelection. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) said in an interview that an estimated 10,000 beneficiaries live in her home state.

Biden is also preparing for immigration to come up next week in the first debate with Trump in which he plans to accuse the former president of promoting an “extreme” agenda on a number of issues — including his family separation policy, Biden officials said. During that period of Trump’s presidency, images of children in cages dominated cable news and Democrats traveled to the southern border in pilgrimages of protest.

“When [Trump] started his family separation policy, Democrats responded with ‘keep families together,’” said Matt Barreto, a Biden campaign pollster and the president of BSP Research. “That’s a winning message, not just with Latino voters, but voters generally. People don’t like these images of families being torn apart, or parents getting deported while they’re at work and never seeing their kids again. Biden is going to have an opportunity to run on a very clear contrast.”

Since the beginning of his presidency, Biden and his team have struggled to shift the debate around immigration, which continues to be one of the worst polling issues for the White House. Simply debuting a new policy designed to protect undocumented spouses of American citizens, on the heels of a separate policy cracking down on asylum claims at the southern border, is no guarantee that the issue suddenly becomes easier to navigate. Republicans, including the Trump campaign, on Tuesday were quick to accuse the president of embracing a de facto form of amnesty by expanding legal protections to those specific classes of undocumented people.

“He's going to formally grant a mass amnesty to millions of illegal aliens that came into our country,” Trump said at a rally Tuesday. The crowd responded with boos. “Under this program illegals will be given immediate green cards and put on the fast-track to rapid citizenship so they can vote. I think a lot of them are going to vote for me.”

The Biden campaign did not say whether it plans to supplement Tuesday’s announcement with paid advertising, though officials said they’re exploring other options for driving this message to voters. The campaign launched a digital ad last month targeting Trump’s family separation policy. Allies said they are eager to see the campaign lean into a more confrontational approach, including at the upcoming debate.

“I absolutely hope that President Biden turns to him and says, ‘Your policies will rip babies from the arms of their mother,” said Democratic strategist Maria Cardona, “‘Your policies will hurt our economy. Your policies will separate families. Your policies have never been and never will be a real solution. Here’s what I have done in the face of Republican intransigence, and here’s what I will continue to do.’”

Biden allies, including in top immigration groups, do have plans in the works. An advocate familiar with their thinking said those entities will use the next few months to contrast the Trump and Biden approach to immigration in national and swing state media, with some groups working on new ads.

The president’s team believes that polling shows the electorate largely approves of what they see as a “balanced” approach — a combination of border security and solutions for long-term, undocumented immigrants. In particular, they have honed in on an April poll conducted by BSPResearch and Global Strategy Group for Immigration Hub that found overwhelming support for the action the president took on Tuesday. The poll showed that 71 percent of voters believe these undocumented residents should be able to stay in the U.S., while 78 percent of Hispanic voters shared this sentiment.

Biden’s team also believes that voters will recoil when reminded that Trump used the threat of family separation as a deterrent for migration.

“There’s a clear contrast between what former President Trump is saying what he wants to do with so many in this country, a crucial part of it, and what President Biden is doing by trying to keep these families together — recognizing that they’ve already been here, they’ve raised their kids here, that they’re an essential part of our workforce,” Cortez Masto said.

The backdrop of the president’s remarks on Tuesday were actions he took two weeks ago that placed major restrictions on asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, spurring outrage from progressives who bemoaned the fact that the president was leaning so heavily into an enforcement-only approach. Those steps came after Republicans defeated a legislative compromise around tougher border security measures.

Biden has since used that episode to accuse Trump of playing politics with the issue and argue that he is delivering solutions amid inaction on the Hill. And the reelection campaign will continue to tout Biden’s executive action from earlier this month, officials said, pointing to a recent drop in border crossings.

But they also plan to highlight Tuesday’s action as evidence that he is finding solutions for the broken immigration system inside the country. Biden campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez and other officials, surrogates and allied lawmakers, including Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), will fan out across the airwaves, on both national and local media, according to Biden aides.

“At a time where so many Americans worry about whether a democracy can actually work, I think President Biden needs to go out there and show folks not just how bad Donald Trump will be, but how he pushed forward real changes in government that make life better for everyday people,” said Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) in an interview with POLITICO.

Biden, on Tuesday, hit these points repeatedly, saying that the White House can forge ahead with border security while also providing new pathways to citizenship. He acknowledged that Americans are concerned about the border and said Trump is playing into these fears.

“And [Trump] says immigrants — and his words are — ‘poisoned the blood of the country.’ When he calls immigrants, in his words, ‘animals.’ When he was president, he separated families and children at the border,” Biden said. “And now he’s proposing to rip spouses and children from their families and homes and communities and place them in detention camps…. Folks, I’m not interested in playing politics with the border or immigration. I’m interested in fixing it.”

Nicholas Wu and Daniella Diaz contributed to this report.