Black communities feel ”stabbed back in the back” by President Joe Biden for deporting immigrants to Haiti, the Rev. Al Sharpton told The Washington Post on Thursday.
”He said on election night: ‘Black America, you had my back, I’ll have yours,”’ the civil rights activist said in a phone interview. ”Well, we’re being stabbed in the back, Mr. President. We need you to stop the stabbing — from Haiti to Harlem.”
Biden, he added, faces a ”defining moment” where he could either ”rise to the occasion” or let down ”those that helped you get here.”
The report comes as Biden condemned the treatment of Haitians by Border Patrol agents this week in Del Rio, Texas, where thousands of migrants set up camp in squalid conditions, waiting to be processed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
”There will be consequences,” Biden told reporters. ”It’s an embarrassment, but it’s beyond an embarrassment — it’s dangerous, it’s wrong, it sends the wrong message around the world and sends the wrong message at home. It’s simply not who we are.”
Sharpton visited the camp on Thursday, telling reporters: ”We went for an hour and toured the place that we feel is a real catastrophic and human disgrace as people around this world watch the Border Patrol use slave-like techniques — mounted on horses.”
The Department of Homeland Security announced Thursday that it was demobilizing horse patrols by agents temporarily after video showed some being aggressive when confronting the migrants. Some agents appeared to be swinging long reins.
By Friday, all the immigrants from the Texas border camp were gone. Most of them had been expelled to Haiti by the Biden administration under pandemic powers that deny people the chance to seek asylum.
”Our policy process has continued to be the same with Haiti as it is for anybody coming through an irregular — through irregular migration across our border,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Thursday.
The Post report says Black Americans are also incensed by Biden’s failure to push voting rights legislation.
”There are too many issues where you can point to and say, ‘You’re just not delivering,”’ said Shelia Huggins, a Democratic National Committee member from North Carolina. Biden, she said, tackled the pandemic well but added that ”my expectations are so much higher. The expectations from Black voters across the country — we have just expected a whole lot more.”
