Three households spoke about their compelled separation by the hands of U.S. immigration authorities at a prebuttal press convention hosted by Vice President Harris’s marketing campaign in Doral, Fla., forward of former President Trump’s Univision city corridor Wednesday night time.
The occasion featured Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) and Harris spokesman Kevin Muñoz, who panned the Trump administration’s household separation coverage and launched Billy, a 16-year-old Guatemalan who was separated from his father in 2018 and later reunited.
“After I went and ran to my dad, I hugged him and I told him I did not want this to happen ever again. And he promised me that he would not ever leave me again,” mentioned Billy.
“And after that, we still fear. We — I go to therapists, but I still have the fear of Trump being reelected, and that same thing happening to me or other kids ever again. Kamala Harris helped us be together again, and she helped us be a family again. And I don’t want this to happen to any more kids. I was separated, and a lot more kids were separated, too.”
The Harris marketing campaign has largely centered its immigration and border safety messaging on enforcement, drawing some criticism from advocates who wish to see a starker distinction to Trump’s more and more strident rhetoric on immigrants.
Trump is anticipated to repeat that message on the Univision occasion in Miami. He was initially slated to look final week, however the city corridor was postponed attributable to Hurricane Milton.
Harris was hosted by Univision in Las Vegas final week for her personal city corridor, during which she targeted her message on the financial system and well being care, and touted her immigration reform proposal earlier than segueing to the failed bipartisan Senate border safety invoice.
However Wednesday’s occasion targeted on the human penalties of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” coverage, which separated almost 4,000 kids from their mother and father for crossing the border with out prior authorization.
Two of the kids who spoke on Wednesday referred to “la hielera” or “ice box,” the slang identify for Customs and Border Safety (CBP) holding cells.
“Hi, I’m Janice Adriana, and I’m here to tell my story. So when I was 6 years old, me and my mom decided to come to the USA when — to see my dad again. But then the migration officials held us in this place that’s called la hielera, which means ice box, and it’s really cold in there, and we couldn’t use beds or nothing. It was just empty. And after that, they told us that they were going to separate me and my mom, and that’s when everything bad started to happen,” mentioned Janice Adriana.
Two brothers, Christian, 12, and Hamilton, 13, spoke of their experiences in foster care.
“She wouldn’t let us eat in the dining — in the kitchen, and she’d just bring the food to the room where we sleep, and they would take us to the park to try to have fun. But we weren’t having fun, we were having our minds with our mom. And the lady told us to speak, speak Spanish, and we lost our own language [from] Guatemala, Q’anjob’al, we lost it,” mentioned Christian.
“And right now, so we got back with our mother. We saw her, we hugged her, we were crying, and then we and then we started to laugh for a few moments.”
The Harris marketing campaign’s give attention to Trump’s least standard border coverage comes as the 2 sides search to persuade undecided Hispanic voters, a bunch with important numbers in each battleground state.
It’s additionally a part of a Harris try to color Trump as harmful and unstable, a portrayal that’s been tough to stay on a candidate with near-universal identify recognition.
“We are having this press conference because we want Americans to remember what Donald Trump did, not just at the border, but what he did to our country. We know that our immigration system is broken, and I can tell you, as a resident of the border, no one knows more that our immigration system is broken than those of us who live on the U.S.-Mexico border and who’ve been working for immigration reform for decades,” mentioned Escobar.
“But what Donald Trump presents are not solutions. Donald Trump doesn’t bring policy ideas to the table. Donald Trump did not fix a broken system. In fact, what Donald Trump did was take a broken system and he obliterated it. He uses cruelty as American public policy. He dehumanizes immigrants. He calls immigrants by the most vile insults, the most offensive names, using deeply racist, ugly attacks, not once will you hear Donald Trump talking about how we should reform our outdated immigration laws.”
