BROWNSVILLE, Texas— President Joe Biden will visit the U.S.-Mexico border on Thursday, where he is expected to highlight the urgency of passing the border deal agreed to in the Senate. President Biden is anticipated to criticize his main opponent, Republican frontrunner President Donald Trump, and House Republicans for obstructing the deal.
The president’s rare visit to the southern border coincides with former President Trump’s dueling Texas visit. President Biden will be traveling to Brownsville, located on the western Gulf Coast, while President Trump is scheduled to be about 300 miles away in Eagle Pass, the epicenter of the current border crisis.
Illegal crossings in the Rio Grande Valley, including Brownsville, have decreased notably in the last year, thanks partly to Texas’ initiatives to prevent illegal immigration, including National Guard members turning migrants back to Mexico. It had been the busiest route for illegal crossings on the U.S.-Mexico border for about a decade before that.
As the 2024 election approaches, the border has become a hot topic for many voters who want to see the problem fixed.
“This is not about politics,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Feb. 28 in response to questions about the president’s visit to the border.
“This is about how we’re going to fix an issue that a majority of Americans care about: a broken immigration system, the challenges at the border. That’s why the president thought it was important to go at this time.”
During his visit, the president is expected to meet with U.S. Border Patrol agents, law enforcement, and local leaders, according to the White House.
This would be the president’s second trip to the border; he last visited in January 2023 when he went to El Paso, Texas.
When asked about the dueling trip, President Biden said he was unaware that his predecessor was also traveling to the border.
“I’ve been planning to go Thursday. What I didn’t know is that my good friend apparently is going,” President Biden told reporters on Feb. 26 while eating ice cream.
Brandon Judd, head of the Border Patrol union, criticized President Biden in a recent op-ed for organizing a trip to Texas right after President Trump’s travel plans and selecting what he referred to as a “safe haven” location.
“Trump will be at Shelby Park, a location that Texas Governor Greg Abbott was forced to seize because of the rampant lawlessness fueled by the Biden administration’s policies,” Mr. Judd wrote on Feb. 28 in an op-ed for Fox News. “Biden will visit an extremely slow location in a very friendly congressional district that historically hasn’t seen much illegal traffic, in large part due to the infrastructure Trump provided while in office, and more recently due to the immediate actions of Abbott after Biden took office.”
Mixed Reactions to Biden’s Visit
Donald Trump secured a 5.6 percentage point victory in Texas in 2020. The Democrats, however, won a significant number of counties along or near the Texas-Mexico border in 2020. For example, in Cameron County, where Brownsville is located, Joe Biden won by 13 percentage points.
Residents of Brownsville had mixed reactions regarding President Biden’s visit.
Lourdes Bolado, 40, a coffee shop owner in downtown Brownsville, is thrilled to hear that a U.S. president is coming to her hometown.
“It’s an honor. It’s exciting. And hopefully, he can work out some of the pressing issues we have here,” she told The Epoch Times.
Ms. Bolado cites illegal crossings of people from Mexico as the most urgent concern for her community.
“We do feel it’s getting out of control,” she said.
However, this problem has not influenced her decision for 2024. Ms. Bolado, who supported Biden in 2020, is dedicated to voting for him in the upcoming election.
Martin Aguilera, a 50-year-old restaurant owner residing in Brownsville, identifies as a Democrat. However, he is unhappy with President Biden’s border policies.
“He’s not doing a good job regarding immigration,” Mr. Aguilera told The Epoch Times.
He expressed his outrage over the recent incident in New York where police officers were assaulted by multiple illegal immigrants.
He believes President Biden is fully responsible for the border crisis and has faith that the former president can address it.
“I’m a Democrat, but I’m going to vote for Trump,” he said, noting that the 2024 election would be his first time voting for a Republican president.
Like many other border towns, Brownsville has a predominantly Hispanic population.
According to Ernesto Castaneda, a sociology professor and director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University, Hispanics who have been in the United States for generations see the immigration issue as many other Americans do.
He pointed out that more recent arrivals tend to look at it differently.
“People who arrived in the last decades may see this as personal as they may have family members among those arriving recently to join them or see others coming for similar reasons to theirs,” he told The Epoch Times. “Speaking badly about immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees is like talking disrespectfully about them or their family members. This is also about family reunification and aiding people fleeing conflict-affected areas.”
Since Oct. 1, 2023, which is the start of the fiscal year, there have been 961,537 encounters on the southern border, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). And more than 7.25 million border encounters have occurred during the Biden presidency.
According to a Monmouth University poll, 76 percent of Americans disapprove of President Biden’s handling of the border. A CBS News poll last month showed that 68 percent of Americans disapprove of his response to the issue.
Failed Border Deal
President Biden’s border visit comes as Congress has failed to pass a border security measure, with most Republicans saying the proposal’s border provisions are inadequate.
The border provisions—as part of a $118 billion package that also included foreign aid to Israel and Ukraine—consisted of emergency authority for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to shut down the border if an average of 4,000 daily encounters were reached over one week. If average encounters were to reach 5,000 per day over the same period, then the DHS secretary would have been required to shut down the border.
The legislation also would have limited the president’s parole authority, a power that gives him the ability to allow more illegal immigrants into the country and raises the legal bar for the initial screening of asylum claims.
It also would have expedited the asylum processing time to six months from many years.
The package didn’t include a restoration of President Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy, which many Republicans have told The Epoch Times is a must-have.
The president has blamed House Republicans’ opposition to the Senate deal, which would give him more emergency authority. He said he had exhausted all available options.
“I’ve done all I can do,” President Biden told reporters on Jan. 30 when asked about whether he had fully used his executive authority to address the influx into the country. “Just give me the power. I’ve asked from the very day I got into office. Give me the Border Patrol. Give me the people, the judges. Give me the people who can stop this and make it work right.”
U.S. Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens expressed the need for additional resources for his agency.
“So far in FY24, USBP has made +890K apprehensions with +120K known ‘gotaways,’” Mr. Owens wrote on X on Feb. 28.
“The unknown is what is most concerning. Who? What? Why? That’s why we need USBP agents in the field with more resources,” he wrote.
From The Epoch Times
