Biden, Trump plan separate visits to border on same day
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump will make dueling trips Thursday to the U.S.-Mexico border, as both candidates try to turn the nation’s broken immigration system to their political advantage in an expected campaign rematch this year.
Biden will travel to Brownsville, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley, an area that often sees large numbers of border crossings, White House press secretary Karine JeanPierre said Monday. He will meet border agents and discuss the need for bipartisan legislation. It would be his second visit to the border as president; he traveled to El Paso in January 2023.
“He wants to make sure he puts his message out there to the American people,” Jean-Pierre said.
Trump will head to Eagle Pass, Texas, about 325 miles away from Brownsville, another hotspot in the state-federal clash over border security, according to three people who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss the plans.
The number of people who are illegally crossing the U.S. border has been rising for complicated reasons that include climate change, war and unrest in other nations, the economy, and cartels that see migration as a cash cow.
The administration has been pairing crackdowns at the border with increasing legal pathways for migrants designed to steer people into arriving by plane with sponsors, not illegally on foot to the border. But current U.S. policy allows for migrants to claim asylum regardless of how they arrive. And the numbers of migrants flowing to the U.S.-Mexico border have far outpaced the capacity of an immigration system that has not been substantially updated in decades. Arrests for illegal crossings fell by half in January, but there were record highs in December.
Biden has excoriated Republicans for abandoning the bipartisan border deal after Trump came out in opposition to the plan to tighten asylum restrictions and create daily limits on border crossings. Trump, meanwhile, has dialed up his anti-immigrant rhetoric, suggesting that migrants are poisoning the blood of the American population.
Trump’s campaign says Biden’s plan to visit the border is a sign that the president is on the defensive. The White House announcement came after Trump’s planned trip had been reported.
Biden’s camp says it’s House Republicans who are on the defensive after Trump said he told GOP legislators to tank the bill that would’ve funded border agents and others in Homeland Security.
Biden now is considering executive actions to help discourage migrants from coming to the U.S.
Biden may invoke authorities outlined in Section 212(f ) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which give a president broad leeway to block entry of certain immigrants into the United States if it would be “detrimental” to the national interest.
But any executive action taken by the administration that cracks down on border crossings is likely to be challenged in court. The White House has informed some lawmakers on Capitol Hill that Biden will not announce an executive order on immigration during his border trip, according to a person familiar with the conversations.
“There is no executive action that would have done what the Senate bipartisan proposal would have done,” Jean-Pierre said. “Politics got in the way.”
According to an AP-NORC poll in January, concerns about immigration climbed to 35% from 27% last year. Most Republicans, 55%, say the government needs to focus on immigration in 2024, while 22% of Democrats listed immigration as a priority. That’s up from 45% and 14%, respectively, compared with December 2022.
The failure of the border bill this month has caused the Homeland Security Department, which controls the border, to shift money between its agencies to plug holes.