Miles apart, Biden and Trump tour US-Mexico border
Three hundred miles apart, President Joe Biden and likely Republican challenger Donald Trump walked along the U.S.Mexico border in Texas 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.
“I want the American people to know what we're trying to get done,” he said to officials there. “We can't afford not to do this.”
Trump, meanwhile, continued his dialed-up attacks on migrants arriving to the border, deriding them as “terrorists” and criminals after harnessing rhetoric once used by Adolf Hitler to argue migrants are poisoning the blood of America.
“The United States of America is being invaded,” he 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 who are 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 to the border.
Arrests for illegal crossings fell by half in January, but there were record highs in December. The numbers of migrants flowing across the U.S-Mexico border 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.
Among those voters, worries about the nation's broken immigration system are rising on both sides of the political divide, which could be especially problematic for Biden.
According to an APNORC poll in January, the share of voters concerned about immigration rose to 35% from 27% last year. Fifty-five percent of Republicans 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, from December 2022.
Trump landed to cheers from a crowd gathered at the small airport who held signs that read: “Trump 2024.” Some yelled, “Way to go, Trump.” He chatted with supporters for a few minutes before getting into his waiting SUV.
From Air Force One, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas dismissed claims the president's visit was political, and noted how badly his department that manages the U.S.-Mexico border needed extra funding that would have been contained 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 Republicancontrolled 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.