AMY GOODMAN: With Election Day eight weeks away, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump sparred in their first and only scheduled debate Tuesday night in Philadelphia, in the key swing state of Pennsylvania. Harris repeatedly put Trump on the defensive as they debated numerous issues, including abortion, immigration, Israel’s war on Gaza, the January 6 insurrection, the economy and other issues. During Tuesday’s debate, Trump repeatedly attacked the Biden-Harris administration’s immigration policies while also spreading xenophobic and racist lies about immigrants and asylum seekers.

This is an excerpt from the ABC News presidential debate that begins with Vice President Kamala Harris.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: And I’m going to actually do something really unusual, and I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies, because it’s a really interesting thing to watch. You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.

And I will tell you, the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you. You will not hear him talk about your needs, your dreams and your — and your desires. And I’ll tell you, I believe you deserve a president who actually puts you first. And I pledge to you that I will.

DONALD TRUMP: First let me respond as to the rallies.

DAVID MUIR: Please.

DONALD TRUMP: She said people start leaving. People don’t go to her rallies. There’s no reason to go. And the people that do go, she’s busing them in and paying them to be there, and then showing them in a different light. So, she can’t talk about that. People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics. That’s because people want to take their country back.

Our country is being lost. We’re a failing nation. And it happened three-and-a-half years ago. And what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War III, just to go into another subject. What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country — and look at what’s happening to the towns all over the United States. And a lot of towns don’t want to talk — not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.

DAVID MUIR: I just want to clarify here — you bring up Springfield, Ohio. And ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community. All this —

DONALD TRUMP: Well, I’ve seen people on television.

DAVID MUIR: Let me just say here, this is the —

DONALD TRUMP: The people on television —

DAVID MUIR: This is the —

DONALD TRUMP: — say, “My dog was taken and used for food.” So, maybe he said that, and maybe that’s a —

DAVID MUIR: Yeah.

DONALD TRUMP: — good thing to say for a city manager. 

DAVID MUIR: I’m not taking this from television. I’m taking it from the city manager.

DONALD TRUMP: But the people are on television saying their dog was eaten by the people that went there.

DAVID MUIR: Again, the Springfield city manager says there’s no evidence of that.

DONALD TRUMP: We’ll find out.

DAVID MUIR: Vice President Harris, I’ll let you respond to the rest of what you’ve heard.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: I mean, talk about extreme. You know, this is, I think, one of the reasons why in this election I actually have the endorsement of 200 Republicans who have formerly worked with President Bush, Mitt Romney and John McCain, including the endorsement of former Vice President Dick Cheney and Congressmember Liz Cheney.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve been listening to an excerpt from last night’s ABC News presidential debate, moderated by David Muir and Linsey Davis.

We’re joined now by Jean Guerrero, contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda, as well as Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir. She’s also a senior journalism fellow at the UCLA Latina Futures 2050 Lab. Her recent piece in The New Republic is headlined “Kamala Harris Should Reframe Immigration as a Gun Control Issue.”

Well, Jean Guerrero, if you can respond overall to the debate and also dive into what President Trump, the former president, is suggesting when he continually, along with his running mate, suggests that immigrants — he didn’t say Haitian immigrants, but that’s what Vance had suggested — are eating people’s pets, dogs and cats?

JEAN GUERRERO: Absolutely, Amy. It’s great to be here.

What we saw last night is that Donald Trump resorted to the same deranged and despicable rhetoric that is meant to divide people. From his very first answer, he was demonizing immigrants, repeating this completely unfounded internet claim about immigrants, you know, eating cats and pets. And in his first line, he was talking about immigrants coming from prisons and jails and mental institutions.

I’ve said this on this show before, and I’ll say it again: Immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than people born in the U.S. Studies consistently show this. But Trump was committed to his usual bit, which is to create the false impression that immigrants are a danger to society. And it was what he resorted to again and again. He sounded angry and, frankly, grating the entire time. He was just griping and griping with a scowl on his face.

And on the other side of Trump’s dishonest ramblings, you had Harris giving responses that were competent, coherent, considered. She was light on her feet. She was joyful. She was getting under his skin and keeping him on the defensive, beating him with talk of his crowd sizes and his imaginary friendship with Putin. She was able to pull off something very difficult. She seemed both stronger and more serious than Trump, but at the same time more fun, more refreshing. I think the average person is sick of Trump’s politics of fear and hate. They want change. And Harris successfully made the case that she represents that.

But on the issue of the border, I think what is really key is that she was able to project strength on the border, which is Trump’s signature issue. She was able to expose Trump as a blowhard on his signature issue, pointing out that he derailed a border security bill that would have increased the number of Border Patrol agents on the border by 1,500 and would have stemmed the flow of fentanyl into the country. And what’s key is that Harris was able to do this without demonizing immigrants. When it comes to the border, Trump punches down, and Harris punches up. He’s focused on punishing and persecuting immigrants, and she prosecutes the transnational criminal organizations that traffic in guns, drugs and people and that are displacing immigrants across Latin America. And she successfully made this case.

But on your last question about what Trump is trying to imply, he is trying to stir up hatred. It’s the politics of hate that I wrote about in Hatemonger. He wants people to believe that all of their problems are due to immigrants, and to create this — you know, an environment that is extremely unsafe for immigrant families, mixed-status communities, people of color across this country. But Harris was able to successfully deflate him on this issue, which I think is a very important thing that she had to do last night, and she was able to deliver.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, but, Jean Guerrero, I would question — I agree with you that Harris seemed a lot more cogent and clear in her points, but I felt that she really did not challenge the narrative of Trump that immigrants are bringing crime to the country, or even at any time seek to defend the contributions that immigrants are making to this country. So, I sort of graded her a lot less on her response to his immigration, which is the key — one of the key planks of his campaign, that the country is being overrun by illegal immigration.

JEAN GUERRERO: I agree. I think that there was a lot more that Harris could have done in this debate. I wish that she had countered him on immigration in a more sustained way, that she had returned to this issue every time that he resorted to his demonizing rhetoric. Unfortunately, she didn’t do that. I think there’s still opportunities for her to do that in the next couple of months.

But I think the key thing was to make him look weak on his signature issue and to expose the fact that he is all about demonizing innocent people who are coming here, fleeing violence, seeking a better life for themselves and for their children. She exposed that his strategy is simply scapegoating and demonizing and is not really rooted in wanting to take action on the border, which is something that the Biden administration attempted to do and which Trump derailed. And when he was asked about why he killed this bipartisan border bill that would have increased Border Patrol agents and helped stem the flow of fentanyl into the country, he went on his incoherent rant about crowd sizes, his crowd sizes, and about Haitian immigrants, you know, his false claim about Haitian immigrants eating cats and people’s pets.

But I agree with you, and I think it’s a very important point to make that she needs to do more. This is Trump’s signature issue. And Trump is promising the largest deportation operation in United States history. So Harris needs to point out that this would be an unconscionable economic and social disaster of epic proportions, worse than his family separation policy during his first term. It would separate millions of mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters from U.S. citizen children. It would split apart families across this nation.

And as former attorney general of California, where sanctuary laws led to fewer crimes in sanctuary jurisdictions where they were implemented — data shows this — Harris can speak with authority about how deportation protections for longtime immigrants make this country safer and encourage mixed-status communities to collaborate with law enforcement, to report crimes. She is well positioned to make this case to boldly defend immigrants and to boldly promise to protect them, those longtime immigrants without criminal records, to protect them from deportation with legal residency or a pathway to citizenship.

I think it would paint a strong contrast with Trump on his number one issue and help her gain momentum with Gen Z, with Latino voters in swing states. More than half of Gen Z Latinos have undocumented relatives or close friends. This is a very important issue. And I think last night’s debate was a good start, but I think there was a lot missing. And I think the key will be that she needs to make this case over the next two months, and make it boldly and strongly and again and again.

AMY GOODMAN: Jean Guerrero, before you go, your New Republic piece is headlined “Kamala Harris Should Reframe Immigration as a Gun Control Issue.” In this last minute we have with you from Arizona, can you explain?

JEAN GUERRERO: Yes. I think that she can coopt Trump’s signature issue by talking about border control in terms of gun control. An iron river of U.S. firearms has flowed south for decades. People are not coming here because, you know, they’re escaping prisons or mental health institutions, as Trump claims. They’re coming because they are fleeing violence that is largely driven by the unfettered flow of U.S. guns into Mexico and beyond. More than 70% of guns seized at crime scenes in Mexico, for example, are traced to the U.S. And like fentanyl, these guns are predominantly trafficked through ports of entry and almost always by U.S. citizens.

And Trump has made nothing but — he’s done nothing but a sabotage attempt to make progress on this continental gun problem, while the Biden-Harris administration have taken historic actions to disrupt weapons trafficking. And I think she needs to own this. She needs to talk about this. She needs to own the fact that by depriving cartels of their firepower, she has done more to protect Americans from fentanyl than Trump ever did. And she is actually targeting the cartels that are displacing people from across Latin America and turning them into exiles, which no previous president has done in a way that she can do, having addressed the root causes of immigration during her term as vice president.

AMY GOODMAN: Jean Guerrero, we want to thank you for being with us, contributing opinion writer to The New York Times. Her books include Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda, also the book Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir, which won a PEN Literary Award. We’ll also link to your New Republic piece that’s headlined “Kamala Harris Should Reframe Immigration as a Gun Control Issue.”

Coming up, we continue discussing the debate and play excerpts, as well as Donald Trump’s false claim that he won the 2020 election. Stay with us.