Joe Biden broke his silence on President Trump’s promise to crack down on immigration as part of the country’s efforts to counter the novel coronavirus pandemic.
“Rather than execute a swift and aggressive effort to ramp up testing, Donald Trump is tweeting incendiary rhetoric about immigrants in the hopes that he can distract everyone from the core truth: he’s moved too slowly to contain this virus, and we are all paying the price for it,” wrote Biden, the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, late Tuesday.
Trump rattled legal and illegal immigrants late Monday with an ominous but light-on-details tweet vowing to sign an executive order temporarily suspending immigration into the United States. “In light of the attack from the Invisible Enemy, as well as the need to protect the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens.”
On Tuesday evening during his daily COVID-19 task force press briefing, Trump said his administration would not consider applications from people seeking to become permanent residents, or green card holders, for 60 days, with more information to come.
Biden chased Trump’s comments with assertions that the White House incumbent could better serve the country if he screened all travelers crossing the border, whether they were citizens or not, to contain the virus.
“That’s one of the most glaring failures of this president’s response and sending inflammatory tweets to try to hide it helps no one. Mr. President, focus on getting the tests,” he wrote.
In another statement, Biden called on Congress to assemble a Pandemic Testing Board to help distribute supplies to the states so they can ramp up their respective testing capacities. His suggestion followed the president’s claim, “not everybody wants to do such significant testing,” when pressed on the country’s slow testing rate.
“We should fully implement the Defense Production Act to speed up the manufacture of swabs and other testing components. And we should partner with our governors — not treat them like the enemy — to identify the virus through testing and use that knowledge to stop its spread,” he wrote.
