DES MOINES, Iowa — A group of illegal aliens protested against former Vice President Joe Biden outside the Democrat debate on Tuesday evening at Drake University, claiming Biden had supported deportations of their community members.
The group, called “United We Dream Action,” singled out Biden because they blamed President Barack Obama for creating what they called “concentration camps” to detain illegal aliens, particularly children, near the southern U.S. border.
“We cannot forget — under the Obama and Biden administration, this mass deportation machine was created,” the leader of the protest shouted. She said that the group did not endorse another candidate, but wanted “accountability” from all of them.
Behind a group of roughly a dozen protesters, standing in the snow in temperatures that dipped to 27 degrees Fahrenheit, was a local mariachi band — called upon to celebrate the “joy” even in the face of deportation, organizers explained.
The group chanted: “Joe Biden: Deport me? No way! Undocumented and here to say!” and “We will fight to our freedom!”
Across the street, a pair of Trump supporters looked on from their tractor, painted and decorated with Trump logos. The owner of the tractor, Gary Leffler, a farmer from Des Moines, gestured across the street and accused Democrats of “promising anything and everything to everyone.” He later drove by the protest, flags fluttering in the frigid evening air.
Earlier, Biden’s wife, Dr. Jill Biden, told a group of voters in Boone, Iowa, that her husband supported a “responsible path toward citizenship” for immigrants, though she did not specify whether she meant legal or illegal immigrants.
The former Second Lady also spoke about “kids in cages,” implying that Trump had created them — when, in fact, the Obama-Biden administration had first created the infamous chain-link enclosures for detained minors in Border Patrol processing centers.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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