Biden challenges Trump to ‘join me’ in tightening the US-Mexico border

President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump made dueling visits to the US-Mexico border on Thursday, with Mr Biden challenging his predecessor to “join me” in securing the country’s southern border, and Mr Trump blamed the president for lawlessness at the border. border.

The comments came at a moment of political peril for Mr. Biden, who has faced criticism from both parties as the number of people crossing into the United States has reached record levels, with encounters with migrants. more than double than in the Trump years.

During their appearances in Texas, some 300 miles apart, Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump sought to leverage what was likely to be the most volatile policy dispute of the 2024 campaign.

The president called on his predecessor to pass a bipartisan bill in Congress that would significantly address border crossings. At Trump’s insistence, Republicans torpedoed the bill – legislation they themselves had asked for – saying it was not strong enough.

“Instead of telling members of Congress to block this legislation, join me,” Biden said in Brownsville, a border city in the Rio Grande Valley.

“You know, and I know, this is the toughest, most efficient, most effective border security law that this country has ever seen,” he said. “Instead of playing politics with this issue, why don’t we just come together and get it done.”

Mr Biden’s words amounted to a political challenge. But they were also an acknowledgment of Mr. Trump’s power over the Republican Party, especially when it comes to the border, at a time when many Americans say immigration is their top concern and they have no confidence that Mr. Biden addresses this issue. .

In Eagle Pass, which has become a common backdrop for politicians wanting to show they are tough on immigration, Trump stood near a makeshift barbed wire wall and used the language of war to describe the border crisis.

“It’s a military operation,” he said after touring Shelby Park, where Gov. Greg Abbott has sent the Texas National Guard to patrol 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 in an effort to portray Mr. Biden as plunging the nation into crime and disorder.

Mr. Trump mourned the death of Laken Riley, the 22-year-old found dead on the campus of the University of Georgia in Athens. The man accused of the murder is a migrant from Venezuela who crossed the southern border in September 2022.

However, even border authorities who worked for 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 if he returns to power in 2025. He would scour the country for mass deportations, build massive camps across the United States to detain undocumented immigrants and deny asylum claims based on claims that the applicants are carriers of infections such as tuberculosis.

The confrontation in Texas was the latest sign of divisive immigration in the United States. Any progress on the issue has hit a wall in Washington, where the country’s polarization has prevented any compromise by lawmakers.

Even Mr. Biden’s choice of Brownsville came under fire from Mr. Trump and his allies as the city has recently seen a decline in border crossings. They said Mr. Biden should have gone to a busier intersection. The administration said Brownsville was an example of how Mr. Biden is working with Mexico to deter migrants.

Along the 2,000-mile border, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said they encountered migrants between ports of entry 124,220 times in January, up from more than 249,000 the month before. But overall, the border crisis has worsened during the Biden administration.

Some causes are beyond Biden’s control, such as the wave of migration around the world 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 prompted human traffickers and smugglers to send migrants to America on the false promise that the new president would open the border.

Even as the Biden administration created legal pathways for migrants and began rebuilding the refugee system, he began to embrace some of Mr. Trump’s more restrictive tactics.

While Biden is still calling on Congress to pass a border bill, he is considering executive actions that would accomplish something similar: restrict asylum at the border. This measure would close the border to new arrivals if an average of more than 5,000 migrants attempted to cross unlawfully per day over the course of a week, or more than 8,500 attempted to cross in a single day. (Republicans say these numbers are still too high.)

The administration has argued that congressional legislation is less likely to face a legal challenge than executive action.

Democrats concerned about harmful immigration policies see a possible path forward with a tougher approach 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 an uphill task to outperform Mr. Trump among voters who care deeply about illegal immigration. Mr. Biden spent most of the 2020 campaign attacking Mr. Trump for his anti-immigration agenda, and he came to power promising to restore compassion and humanity to the immigration system.

His wife Jill Biden visited a camp in Matamoros, Mexico, in 2019 that was filled with migrants rejected by the former president. She wrote in an opinion essay in 2020 that Mr. Biden would “restore asylum protections.”

Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, Democrat of Texas, said Thursday that despite Biden’s stronger stance on immigration, he does not put the president in the same category as 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 from mothers’ arms, separate families and lock children in cages, but we’re going to bring order to the border.”