Former Vice President Joe Biden is criticizing President Trump’s immigration policies as a “national shame.”
In a speech to the nation’s largest Hispanic civil rights group, Mr. Biden said the administration’s previous policy of separating illegal migrant children from their parents at the border is part of Mr. Trump’s “assault on our dignity.”
“Grotesque lies about immigrants and policies that rip babies from their mothers’ arms carry echoes of the darkest moments in our history,” Mr. Biden told the annual LULAC convention Friday night in Phoenix, Arizona. “Not only are they a national shame—they tarnish the very idea of America, and diminish our standing in the world.”
The former vice president, 75, is often mentioned as a possible candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. Mr. Trump said earlier this week that he relishes the thought of squaring off against Mr. Biden in the election.
“I dream about Biden. That’s a dream,” Mr. Trump said. “Joe Biden ran three times. He never got more than 1 percent and President Obama took him out of the garbage heap, and everybody was shocked that he did. I’d love to have it be Biden.”
Mr. Biden attended a Phoenix fundraiser Friday for Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Kyrsten Sinema.
At the LULAC convention, he said the administration’s “assault on our dignity runs even deeper than” its border policies.
“It doesn’t just reveal itself in the betrayal of the Dreamers, or the pardoning of a sheriff who has terrorized this community,” he said in a reference to Mr. Trump’s pardoning of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who is running for the GOP Senate nomination.
Mr. Biden said, “It’s also in the underfunding of our schools, in attacks on Labor and the ability of workers to bargain for their worth, and in the neglect of Puerto Ricans after Hurricane Maria, where many children—American children— have lost a year of school due to the devastation.”...
“We’re in the midst of an all-out assault on human dignity—yes, at the border, but also in the courtroom, in the classroom, and on the factory floor,” he said.He called for Hispanics to support a vision of “one America.”“I could not be more proud to stand with you for the battles ahead,” Mr. Biden said. “It’s time for us to stand up, hold our heads high, remember who we are.”