President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump will make dueling trips to the Mexican border in Texas on Thursday.
The visits underscore immigration's central importance in the 2024 presidential race and how much both Biden and Trump are seeking to use the nation’s broken system to their political advantage.
"Biden will travel to Brownsville, Texas to meet with U.S. Border Patrol agents, law enforcement officials, and local leaders," the White House said in a statement reported by NBC News. The trip to the border would be Biden's second visit to the border as president. He traveled to El Paso in January 2023.
"He will discuss the urgent need to pass the Senate bipartisan border security agreement, the toughest and fairest set of reforms to secure the border in decades," the statement said. "He will reiterate his calls for Congressional Republicans to stop playing politics and to provide the funding needed for additional U.S. Border Patrol agents, more asylum officers, fentanyl detection technology, and more."
Trump, for his part, will head to Eagle Pass. Through his press secretary, Trump criticized Biden's trip and said he had three years to visit the border and fix the crisis along the Rio Grande.
Trump's camp said Biden's plan to visit the border is a sign that the president is on the defensive over immigration and the issue is a problem for his reelection effort. Biden's camp said it's House Republicans who are on the defensive after Trump flatly said he told GOP legislators to tank the bill that would have funded border agents and other Homeland Security authorities.
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.
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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 U.S. policy right now 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 migrants are poisoning the blood of Americans.
While he continues to criticize Republicans for legislative inaction, Biden is considering executive actions to help discourage migrants from coming to the U.S. Among the actions under consideration by Biden is invoking authorities outlined in Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which gives a president broad leeway to block entry of certain immigrants into the United States if it would be “detrimental” to the national interest.
But without changes to the law, 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 on Thursday, according to a person familiar with the conversations.
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.
Trump is again making immigration the centerpiece of his campaign, seizing on images of migrants sleeping in police stations and in hangars as proof that Biden’s policies have failed. He’s made frequent trips to the border as a candidate and president.
During his 2016 campaign, he traveled to Laredo, Texas in July 2015 for a visit that highlighted how his views on immigration helped him win media attention and support from the GOP base. Since leaving office he’s been to the border at least twice, including to pick up the endorsement of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
The failure of the border bill this month has caused the Homeland Security Department, which controls the border, to assess its priorities and shift money between its agencies to plug holes. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is considering slashing detention beds to 22,000 from 38,000 and reducing deportation flights. That would mean more migrants released into the U.S. who arrive at the border.
Biden, meanwhile, visited the border only once, and he did not come into contact with any migrants. Rather, he inspected Customs and Border Protection facilities and walked a stretch of border wall. During negotiations on the border bill, he suggested he'd shut down asylum if given the power, a remarkable shift to the right for Democrats who are increasingly concerned by the same scenes of migrant encampments, and are asking the administration to speed up work authorizations so families who have arrived can at least seek employment.
