Immigration politics exploded to the front-burner of the Democratic primary process on Wednesday as presidential hopefuls took turns blasting President Trump in the wake of the deaths of a Salvadoran man and his two-year-old daughter, drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande.
‘It’s heartbreaking. It should also p**s us all off,’ said former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro during the first primary debate of the 2020 election season.
Castro called for a change in federal law that would no longer ‘criminalize desperation’ by reclassifying border-jumping as a civil infraction instead of a crime.
Ohio Rep Tim Ryan blasted the Trump administration for presiding over a longstanding but deteriorating system that houses children separately from the adults who bring them into the US.
‘What kind of a country are we running here?’ he asked, claiming that ‘we’ve got kids literally laying in their own snot with three-week-old diapers that haven’t been changed.’
Wednesday’s debate was the most bilingual in American history, with three candidates speaking Spanish on stage.