President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump made dueling visits to the U.S.-Mexico border on Thursday, with Mr. Biden calling on his predecessor to join me in securing the country’s southern border and Mr. Trump calling on the president for lawlessness blamed border.
The comments came at a time of political peril for Mr. Biden, who has faced criticism from both parties as the number of people entering the United States has reached record levels and encounters with migrants have more than doubled than in the Trump administration -years.
In appearances held about 300 miles apart in Texas, Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump sought to exploit what is likely to be the most sensitive political dispute of the 2024 campaign.
The president called on his predecessor to help pass bipartisan legislation in Congress that would take strong action against border crossings. At Mr Trump’s urging, Republicans torpedoed the bill – legislation they themselves had called for – saying it was not strong enough.
“Instead of telling members of Congress to block this bill, join me,” Mr. Biden said in Brownsville, a border town in the Rio Grande Valley.
“You know, and I know, that it is the toughest, most efficient and most effective border security law this country has ever seen,” he said. “Instead of playing politics with this issue, why don’t we just get together and get it done?”
Mr Biden’s words amounted to a political challenge. But they were also a recognition of Mr. Trump’s power over the Republican Party, particularly when it comes to the border, at a time when many Americans say immigration is their top concern and they don’t trust Mr. Biden to address it concerned with it.
In Eagle Pass, which has become a popular backdrop for politicians seeking to show they are tough on immigration, Mr. Trump stood near a makeshift wall of razor wire and used the language of war to describe the border crisis.
“It’s a military operation,” he said after a tour of Shelby Park, where Gov. Greg Abbott has sent the Texas National Guard to monitor the border. Mr. Trump said the migrants “look like warriors to me,” adding that “something is going on.” It’s bad.” He also highlighted crimes committed by migrants, attempting to portray that Mr. Biden is plunging the nation into crime and disorder.
Mr. Trump lamented the death of Laken Riley, the 22-year-old who was found dead on the University of Georgia campus in Athens. The man charged with her murder is a migrant from Venezuela who crossed the southern border in September 2022.
However, even border officials who worked for Mr. Trump have said that most migrants crossing the border are vulnerable families fleeing poverty and violence rather than criminals.
Mr. Trump plans an extreme expansion of his anti-immigration policies when he returns to power in 2025. He would scour the country for mass deportations, set up massive camps across the United States to hold undocumented immigrants, and reject asylum applications based on claims that the applicants were carriers of infections such as tuberculosis.
The showdown in Texas was the latest sign of how divisive immigration has become in the United States. Any progress on the issue has its limits in Washington, where polarization in the country has prevented any compromise from lawmakers.
Even Biden’s decision to go to Brownsville came under fire from Trump and his allies because the city has seen a recent decline in border crossings. They said Mr. Biden should have gone for a busier transition. The administration said Brownsville was an example of Mr. Biden working with Mexico to deter migrants.
Along the 2,000-mile border, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it encountered migrants between ports of entry 124,220 times in January, up from more than 249,000 the previous month. But overall, the border crisis has worsened during the Biden administration.
Some of the causes are beyond Mr. Biden’s control, such as the global migration surge and Republicans who have tried to thwart his efforts to address the problems. But the crisis has defied easy solutions for years, and some critics say his early promises of more humane treatment encouraged traffickers and smugglers to send migrants to America on the false promise that the new president would open the border.
Even as Mr. Biden’s administration created legal pathways for migrants and began rebuilding the refugee system, he adopted some of Mr. Trump’s more restrictive tactics.
Although Mr. Biden is still calling on Congress to pass a border law, he is considering executive action that would do something similar — restricting asylum at the border. The move would close the border to new arrivals if an average of more than 5,000 migrants tried to cross illegally over the course of a week or more than 8,500 in one day. (Republicans say those numbers are still too high.)
The government has argued that the likelihood of a legal challenge through congressional legislation is lower than through executive action.
Democrats concerned about harmful immigration policies see a possible path forward in tougher action after Tom Suozzi, a former Democratic congressman, won a closely watched special House election in New York last month.
Mr. Suozzi took a tough stance on the border, calling for its closure and challenging Republicans on issues they typically dominate, such as immigration.
Mr. Biden will face the difficult task of outdoing Mr. Trump among voters who care about illegal immigration. Mr. Biden spent most of the 2020 campaign attacking Mr. Trump over his anti-immigration agenda, and he came into office promising to restore compassion and humanity to the immigration system.
His wife, Jill Biden, visited a camp in Matamoros, Mexico, in 2019 that was full of migrants who had been turned away by the former president. She wrote in a 2020 opinion essay that Mr. Biden would “restore asylum protections.”
Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, Democrat of Texas, said Thursday that despite Mr. Biden’s more forceful stance on immigration, he does not put the president in the same category as Mr. Trump.
“I still think they are very different,” said Mr. Gonzalez, who accompanied Mr. Biden on his tour. “I mean, we’re not going to rip children out of mothers’ arms, separate families and lock up children, but we’re going to keep order at the border.”
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2024-03-01 03:04:57
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