Donald Trump accused President Biden on Tuesday of rewarding “sham marriages” at the expense of military veterans “dying on the street,” as he ripped his 2024 opponent’s new executive order.
During a campaign rally in Racine, Wis., Trump slammed the 81-year-old president’s plan to speed up work permits for non-citizens who graduate from US colleges and allow certain undocumented immigrants to apply for lawful permanent residency if they are married to Americans.
The former president called the plan a “lawless executive action” that will grant “mass amnesty to millions of illegal aliens.”
“All an illegal alien has to do is sign up for his new program – it’s a sham marriage or college degree – and they can expect amnesty and taxpayer support,” the presumptive Republican nominee for president said.
“We are supporting people that come in illegally, but our soldiers, our veterans, are dying on the streets of these horribly-run Democrat cities,” Trump, 78, added.
“Our country is under invasion. We should not be talking amnesty. We should be talking about stopping the invasion.”
Trump raged that in Democrat-run cities migrants have been “living in luxury hotels” while “literally wounded” veterans are left to fend for themselves on the streets.
“They’re wounded from what’s taken place, from the trauma, but they’re wounded and they’re laying in the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles and New York and Chicago and Oakland and all over the place, and you have other people living in luxury hotels,” he claimed.
“You tell me, is this country screwed up, or what?”
Biden’s order will allow around 500,000 non-citizen spouses and approximately 50,000 of their children to apply for lawful permanent resident status without leaving the country.
People who illegally enter the US and marry an American currently can return to their home countries to then apply for permanent US residency. But in some instances, they can be subject to a 10-year or 20-year ban on reentry, resulting in many spouses of US citizens choosing not to go through the process.
Trump suggested that the program isn’t fair to immigrants who choose to leave the US and go through that process.
“You have people that have been working for 10 years to try and come in legally, and they just keep working,” the former president said.
Trump alleged that the plan ultimately seeks to boost Democratic voter rolls.
“Under this program, a deluge of illegals will be given immediate green cards and put on the fast track to rapid citizenship so they can vote,” he claimed.
“I think a lot of them are going to vote for me,” Trump argued, citing his polling numbers with Hispanic voters.
He vowed that Biden’s executive order would be “ripped up and thrown out” on the first day of his presidency, if elected in November.
Trump’s remarks in Racine come less than a month before he will be formally nominated for the GOP presidential ticket at the Republican National Convention in nearby Milwaukee.
Head to head, Trump leads Biden in the Badger State by one percentage point among likely voters (41%-40%), according to the survey released earlier this month by the Florida Atlantic University Political Communication and Public Opinion Research Lab (PolCom Lab) and Mainstreet Research.
A RealClearPolitics average of polls before Trump’s May 30 guilty verdict gives him a much slighter 0.1 percentage points edge over Biden in Wisconsin.
Biden won Wisconsin by a narrow 0.63% margin in 2020. Four years earlier, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the state by 0.77%.