Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Migration takes center stage in dual border trips
Biden, Trump both in Texas to stress positions on issue
BROWNSVILLE, Texas — Three hundred miles apart, President Joe Biden and likely Republican challenger Donald Trump walked along the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas on Thursday, in dueling trips underscoring how important immigration has become for the 2024 election and how much each man wants to use it to his advantage.
Each chose an optimal location to make his points, their schedules remarkably similar. They each got a briefing on operations and issues, walked the border and gave remarks that overlapped. But that’s where the comparisons ended.
Biden, who sought to spotlight how Republicans tanked a bipartisan border security deal on Trump’s orders, went to the Rio Grande Valley city of Brownsville. For nine years, this was the busiest corridor for illegal crossings, but they have dropped sharply in recent months.
The president walked a quiet stretch of the border along the Rio Grande and received a lengthy operations briefing from Homeland Security agents who talked to him bluntly about what more they needed.
Trump, meanwhile, continued his dialed-up attacks on migrants arriving at the border, deriding them as “terrorists” and criminals after harnessing rhetoric used by Adolf Hitler to argue migrants are poisoning the blood of America.
“This is a Joe Biden invasion,” Trump said.
Trump was in Eagle Pass, roughly 325 miles northwest of Brownsville, in the corridor that’s currently seeing the largest number of crossings. He went to a local park that has become a Republican symbol of defiance against the federal immigration enforcement practices it mocks.
Gov. Greg Abbott and Texas National Guard soldiers gave him a tour, showing off razor wire they put up on Abbott’s orders and in defiance of a U.S. Supreme Court order.
“This is like a war,” Trump said.
The number of people illegally crossing the U.S. border has been rising for years 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’s approach has been to pair crackdowns at the border with
increasing legal pathways for migrants designed to steer people into arriving by plane with sponsors, not illegally on foot.
Arrests for illegal crossings fell by half in January, after record highs in December. The numbers of migrants have far outpaced the capacity of an immigration system that has not been substantially updated in decades. Trump and Republicans claim Biden is refusing to act, but absent law change from Congress, any major policies are likely to be challenged or held up in court.
From Air Force One, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas dismissed claims the president’s visit was political and noted how badly his department needs extra funding included in the collapsed bill.
“This visit is focused on the work that we do, not the rhetoric of others,” he said. “This is focused on operational needs, operational challenges and the significant impact that legislation would have in enhancing our border security.”
In a symbol of the political divide, the Republican-controlled House voted to impeach Mayorkas over the Biden administration’s handling of the U.S.-Mexico border.
Democrats say the charges amount to a policy dispute, not the “high crimes and misdemeanors” laid out as a bar for impeachment in the Constitution.
Since the president was last at the border a year ago, the debate over immigration in Washington has shifted further to the right. Democrats have become increasingly eager to embrace border restrictions now that migrants are sleeping in police stations and airplane hangars in major cities.
Duringbipartisantalksonanimmigration deal, Biden himself said he’d be willing to “shut down the border” right now, should it pass.
The talks looked promising for a while.
But Trump, who didn’t want to give Biden a political win on one of his signature campaign issues, convinced Republicans to kill the deal.
Biden vowed to make sure everyone knew why.
“Every day, between now and November, the American people are gonna know that the only reason the border is not secure is Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican friends,” Biden said last month, referring to the former president’s Make America Great Again slogan.