On Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Source,” Biden Campaign Principal Deputy Campaign Director Quentin Fulks responded to a question on how President Joe Biden reportedly planning to issue an executive order to shut down the border when crossings reach a certain number squares with him criticizing then-President Donald Trump for making people wait in another country to apply for asylum by stating that “there’s no comparison in the way that President Biden approaches immigration policy and former President Trump. When Trump was President, he was putting kids in cages. We are still working to, honestly, reunite families that Trump separated because of his immigration policies.”
After playing video of Biden criticizing Trump for forcing people to wait in another country to apply for asylum, host Kaitlan Collins asked, “What do you say to voters who look at where President Biden was in 2020 and where he is now, on the cusp of signing this executive order?”
Fulks answered, “Well, look, what I would say to voters is that there’s no comparison in the way that President Biden approaches immigration policy and former President Trump. When Trump was President, he was putting kids in cages. We are still working to, honestly, reunite families that Trump separated because of his immigration policies. I don’t think that there is any comparison at all in what we’re talking about. And, in fact, President Biden has spent every single day while in the Oval Office, working on both sides of the [aisle] to bring leaders together from the Republican and the Democratic Party to get comprehensive immigration reform done. And when he had a deal, Donald Trump called Speaker Johnson (R-LA) and told him to kill it because he didn’t want President Biden to, quote, get a political win. We see Donald Trump continuing to stay in this race only for himself. He is not interested in solving problems like immigration in America. He is only interested in making sure that he scores political points and doing whatever he can to get his way. He thinks he’s above the law, and that’s who Donald Trump is. So, I would say to those voters that there is simply no comparison [between] Donald Trump’s approach to immigration policy and that of President Biden’s.”
He added, “I don’t think that this is a Trump impression. I think that President Biden is leading, and that is never something that Donald Trump even considered during his time in the White House. But what I can say is that President Biden is approaching this [as] commander-in-chief, and one of those jobs is to secure the border, and that’s exactly what President Biden is doing here.”
Collins then asked, “[H]ow do you see it in the sense of, it is a different message from what we heard in 2020. And I think a lot of people would sit at home and say, it’s just a sign of how the politics on this issue have shifted in a real way. Is that how you see it?”
Fulks responded, “No. And I don’t think it’s important how I see it. I think it’s important how President Biden sees it as the President of the United States. And I think President Biden is doing what he needs to do in order to secure the border, and that’s what I think you can expect to hear from him tomorrow, perhaps.”
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