BALTIMORE — Border control issues hang over Thursday’s presidential debate after a suspect in a Harford County murder case was arrested for illegally entering the United States.
President Joe Biden, a Democrat and former president Donald Trumpthe GOP’s presumptive nominee at next month’s convention will meet in Atlanta on Thursday evening in the first debate of the campaign. Immigration has become a central issue, with Republicans accusing Biden of failing to keep the border secure and Democrats countering that the GOP is playing electoral politics by rejecting border enforcement measures that could have helped Biden politically.
“I certainly hope that the immigration issue will come up,” Harford County Executive Bob Cassilly, a Republican and Trump supporter, said in an interview Wednesday.
He said the influx of undocumented migrants was reaching the “home base” in Harford following the killing of Rachel Morin, a 37-year-old mother of five whose body was found last August in a wooded area near the Ma & Pa Heritage Trail in Bel Sky.
The suspect, Victor Antonio Martinez-Hernandez, is from El Salvador and entered the United States unlawfully last year, according to Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler. He was arrested in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 14 and extradited to Maryland last Thursday.
“Not since John Wilkes Booth have we been in a position so often where, I think, we’ve been so intimately affected by these national policies that are really just failures,” Cassilly said. A native of Harford County, Booth was the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865.
Trump has used Morin’s murder to attack Biden’s border policy.
Meanwhile, Biden recently imposed significant restrictions on immigrants seeking asylum in the US, then offered potential citizenship to about 500,000 people without legal status who are married to US citizens and have lived in the country for more than a decade.
Biden’s order on border restrictions came after Republicans twice rejected a bipartisan border security deal earlier this year after Trump opposed it. The legislation, which was shelved by the Republican Party after a procedural vote, included funding for new Border Patrol agents and was intended to reduce the number of border crossings. Maryland Democrats in Congress accused Republicans of rejecting the bill because they wanted to keep border control as a campaign issue.
But Erin Layman, 49, Morin’s half-sister, said Wednesday: “The government has opened the front door and we have to close it. And if Rachel’s story can help with that, so much the better.”
On the day the defendant was returned to Harford, Trump called Morin’s mother to offer his condolences. He and his campaign have cited her case several times.
“Our family is honored that President Trump mentioned my sister’s name,” Layman said. “He not only mentioned her name, but he contacted our family and spoke to Rachel’s mother on the phone for 40 minutes.”
Layman said she recently attended a Trump rally in Philadelphia, and “the first thing he said to me was, ‘I had a great conversation with Patricia’ and it’s a blessing that with everything he was going through, he cared enough to contact us for our family.”
Trump has long made immigration a central issue in his presidency and his campaigns.
He pledged to put American workers first and protect the country’s security and in 2018 threatened to close the southern border and impose tariffs on Mexican goods. He has called Mexico an “abuser” of the United States and said Mexicans “bring drugs, bring crime, are rapists. And some, I suppose, are good people.”
The first presidential debate of 2024 between the two candidates will air live on CNN on Thursday at 9 p.m., with hosts Jake Tapper and Dana Bash moderating.
