Former Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke criticized Joe Biden for his administration’s immigration policy.

O’Rourke said Biden has failed to deliver on his campaign promises regarding the asylum process.

Speaking at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics on Thursday, O’Rourke said he was optimistic during Biden’s campaign that his border policy would be a drastic improvement over former President Trump’s strategy.

From Fox News:

“When Joe Biden was running in 2020, he ran with such incredible moral clarity on this issue: ‘We will no longer put kids in cages because they’re not animals, we will no longer tear babies from the breasts of their mothers,’ literally what Trump was doing in his family separation policy,” O’Rourke said. “‘We’re going to restore the soul of America, and we’re going to live up to our promise.’ Man, that was inspiring to me. I needed to hear that, living on the border and as someone who really cares about that.”

O’Rourke admitted that he believes Biden has been successful in addressing immigration “on some counts” and that his administration’s rhetoric is a “night-and-day” difference when compared to the Trump years.

“Biden is not inspiring, I don’t think, any acts of political terror or the kind of slaughter that we saw in El Paso, and yet, on other counts, he’s really failing us,” he said.

“The asylum ban that we see that makes it so hard for people to lawfully, safely, and in an orderly fashion come to this country when they cannot stay in their own,” the ex-congressman continued. “Because why the hell else would you travel 2,000 miles – the length of this continent – much of it on foot, some of it on top, not inside, of a train, called the Beast, La Bestia, facing rape, torture, you know, kidnapping by these transnational criminal organizations, only to come to the most heavily militarized border probably anywhere in this hemisphere, if not this planet, where you risk your life. And more migrants have died this year than any year on record.”

 

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