The Biden campaign has a new digital ad coming out Tuesday that attacks former President Donald Trump on his family separation policy while he was in office.
The 50-second ad, called “Ripped Apart,” was first reported by Axios. It aims to highlight President Biden’s efforts to keep migrant families together.
In the ad, clips of Mr. Trump talking about separating families are interwoven with clips of crying children.
“We did family separation. A lot of people didn’t come,” he says in one clip.
“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” he says in another.
In another clip he says, “When you say to a family that if you come, we’re going to break you up, they don’t come.”
“If Trump is re-elected, the chaos and cruelty we saw in his first term is the floor: he’ll go even further to attack and demonize immigrants, while doing nothing to address the real issues plaguing our broken immigration system,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodriguez said in a statement to the outlet.
Mr. Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy was implemented in 2018, but the administration started separating families in mid-2017.
Undocumented immigrants who crossed the border and were older than 18 were imprisoned, while their younger family members were handed off to the Department of Health and Human Services and shipped to care shelters.
Thousands of children were separated from their parents for months.
Mr. Biden’s “reversal of President Trump‘s immigration policies has created an unprecedented immigration, humanitarian, and national security crisis on our southern border and has led to [the] highest rates of human trafficking on record,” Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told Axios.
Ms. Leavitt said Mr. Trump “will restore his effective immigration policies, implement brand new crackdowns that will send shock waves to all the world’s criminal smugglers, and marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation of illegal criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers in American history.”