The first debate of the 2024 presidential election featured the usual anti-immigration accusations, with former President Trump calling immigrants criminals and saying psychiatric hospitals abroad are emptying because immigrants are coming here.

President Biden fired back, calling Trump's claims a lie and “bullshit” that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States. Research suggests.

Trump repeated comments he made at his rallies, accusing Biden of supporting an open border. “I want to ask you: Why are you allowing millions of people from prisons, jails and mental hospitals to come into our country and destroy our country?” Trump said.

“These murderers are invading our country, raping and murdering women. This is a terrible thing,” Trump said later.

Biden countered, “That's simply not true. There is no data to back up what he's saying. Once again, he's exaggerating. He's lying.”

Trump has tried to portray the border as chaotic and unregulated, and Biden has noted that under Trump, children who cross the border have been separated from their families.

“During his presidency, he took babies away from their mothers, he put them in cages, he separated families,” Biden said. “That's not the way to do things.”

The Biden administration this month raised the legal threshold for asylum claims, limiting the number of illegal border crossers seeking asylum, which continues to see an average of more than 2,500 arrests per day.

Biden noted that Republicans in Congress, at Trump's urging, killed comprehensive legislation to strengthen border security and overhaul immigration policy because Trump wanted to make immigration a campaign issue rather than address the problems at the southern border.

Biden also said people crossing the border are on the decline. After record arrests late last year, the Border Patrol said preliminary data since Biden's announcement shows apprehensions have fallen 40%. May figures showed arrests had fallen to the third-lowest number of any month during Biden's presidency.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials 895 migrant bodies By 2022, the number will be three times that of 2018, a figure that advocates say is a huge underestimate.

Trump has called for mass deportations of immigrants who are in the country illegally. He was asked how he would achieve that and whether such a policy would apply to the spouses of those in the country legally. He did not directly answer the question, but instead repeated his claims about the influx of immigrants into the country.