Biden & Trump to Head to Mexico Border, Dueling for Advantage on Immigration

By: Seung Min Kim, Colleen Long, Zeke Miller & Jill Colvin

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 or 520 kilometers 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.

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.

The trips underscore immigration’s central importance in the 2024 presidential race, for Republicans and increasingly for Democrats, particularly after congressional talks on a deal to rein in illegal migration collapsed.

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.

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.

Trump’s campaign says 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. Trump’s campaign press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said Biden was chasing Trump and is responsible for the “worst immigration crisis in history.”

Biden’s camp says 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 New York Times first reported the travel.

While he continues to criticize Republicans for legislative inaction, Biden is considering executive actions to help discourage migrants from coming to the U.S.

(AP)