BIDEN, TRUMP PLAN TRIPS TO BORDER
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump will make dueling trips to the U.S-Mexico border on Thursday, 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 Jean-Pierre 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 last year.
“He wants to make sure he puts his message out there to the American people,” Jean-Pierre said.
Trump, for his part, will head to Eagle Pass,
Texas, about 325 miles away from Brownsville, another hot spot 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.
Biden, speaking in New York on Monday, said he had planned to head to the border on Thursday and didn’t know “my good friend apparently is going,” too. The White House announcement of the trip came after Trump’s plan to visit the border had been reported. The president declined to say whether he would meet with migrants on the trip.
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 migrants are poisoning the blood of Americans.
The number of people who are illegally crossing the U.S. border has been rising for years because of complicated reasons that include climate change, war and unrest in other nations, the economy, and cartels that see migration as a cash cow.