Biden and Trump try to promote immigration for their political advantage during dueling trips to Texas

(Andrew Harnik/Associated Press)

Biden and Trump try to promote immigration for their political advantage during dueling trips to Texas

Immigration and the border, Mexico and America

COLLEEN LONG, SEUNG MIN KIM and JILL COLVIN

February 29, 2024

President Biden and his likely Republican challenger Donald Trump are both heading to the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas on Thursday in a sign of how central immigration has become to the 2024 election and how much both candidates want to use it to their advantage.

Each has chosen an optimal location to emphasize their respective points.

Biden, who wants to highlight how Republicans brokered a bipartisan border security deal on Trump’s orders, will go to the city of Brownsville in the Rio Grande Valley. For nine years this was the busiest corridor for illegal crossings, but in recent months illegal crossings there have fallen sharply.

Trump, for his part, wants to continue his attacks on Biden and his rhetoric after saying that migrants were poisoning the blood of Americans. He will do this from Eagle Pass, about 320 miles northwest of Brownsville, in the corridor that currently has the largest number of crossings. Trump is expected to speak from a state park that has become a Republican symbol of opposition to the federal government’s immigration enforcement practices.

In other words: the split

The on-screen moment couldn’t possibly be more divisive, with each candidate asking voters to take their side on immigration.

Among voters, concerns about the country’s broken immigration system are growing on both sides of the political divide.

what something that

could be especially problematic for Biden.

Biden and Trump plan to make dueling trips to the US-Mexico border

According to an AP-NORC 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 should focus on immigration in 2024, while 22% of Democrats list immigration as a priority. That’s an increase from 45% and 14% respectively as of December 2022.

The number of people crossing the U.S. border illegally has been rising for years for complicated reasons, including climate change, war and unrest in other countries, the economy and cartels that see migration as a cash cow.

The administration’s approach has been to combine a crackdown at the border with increasingly legal routes for migrants, designed to encourage people to arrive with sponsors by plane, not illegally on foot.

to at

the border.

Arrests for illegal crossings fell by half in January, but reached record highs in December. The numbers of migrants pouring across the U.S.-Mexico border have far exceeded the capacity of an immigration system that has not been substantially updated in recent decades. Trump and Republicans argue that Biden is refusing to act, but if Congress doesn’t enact a change in the law, any major policy will likely be challenged or held up in court.

The White House is weighing executive actions at the border with immigration powers used by Trump

Trump said in an op-ed in the Daily Mail on Thursday that Biden was copying him by going to the border, although the White House insisted the president’s trip was quietly in the works before Trump’s visit was announced.

On a last-minute trip, Biden chases me to the border, no doubt desperate to avoid blame for the catastrophe he has caused, Trump wrote. But don’t be fooled. The abolition of US borders is Joe Biden’s policy. The mass

Migration of millions of illegal aliens to the United States is Joe Biden’s plan.”

Unlike Trump, Biden has made few trips to the border. 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 as migrants sleep in police stations and airplane hangars in major cities.

During bipartisan talks on an immigration deal that would have made access difficult for migrants, Biden himself said he would be willing to close the border now if the deal were passed.

GOP Governors Return to Texas Borderlands; many migrants move downstream to cross

The talks seemed promising for a while. But Trump, unwilling to give Biden a political victory on any of his signature campaign issues,

convinced convinced

Republicans to end the deal. Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson

(

R-La.

)

declared the deal dead on arrival.

Biden promised to make sure everyone knew why.

Every day, between now and November, the American people will know that the only reason the border isn’t secure is Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican friends, Biden said earlier this month, referencing the former’s Make America Great Again slogan president.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the president will meet with U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials, law enforcement officials, frontline personnel and local leaders during his trip to Texas.

Trump will speak from Shelby Park, a vast area along the Rio Grande owned by the city of Eagle Pass. It was taken over by the governor of Texas last month. Greg Abbott, who subsequently banned Border Patrol agents from operating there. The Biden administration sued and the U.S. Supreme Court allowed federal agents to cut the razor wire surrounding the park, but Abbott has since done more defiantly, challenging federal authority.

Speaker Johnson leads House GOP on a trip to a Texas border town as aid to Ukraine hangs in the balance

While there, Trump is expected to present updated immigration proposals that would mark a dramatic escalation from the approach he used during his time in office that raised alarms from civil rights activists and numerous lawsuits.

Some of these include reviving and expanding its controversial travel ban, imposing “ideological screening for migrants, ending all work permits, and cutting off funding for shelter and transportation for people in the country illegally.” Trump will also likely bring up the murder of migrants. a 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia, the suspect is a Venezuelan migrant.

Biden is ludicrously trying to blame me and Republicans in Congress for the national security and public safety disaster he has created, Trump wrote in the British newspaper. He caused this catastrophe. At any point in the last three years he could have closed the border. If re-elected, I will close the border and stop the invasion on day one. And we will begin the process of removing Biden’s illegal aliens from our country.

Colvin reported from Eagle Pass. Texas Associated Press writer Valerie Gonzalez contributed to this report.

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