President Biden plans to make a rare visit to the southern border on Thursday, his press secretary said, traveling to Brownsville, Texas, on the same day that former President Donald J. Trump has already planned a trip to the border.
The plans underscore the urgency now driving Mr. Biden and his team on immigration, which has become one of his most pressing policy liabilities. Under the Biden administration, record numbers of immigrants have crossed the southern border — a fact that Mr. Trump and Republicans have aggressively leveled against Mr. Biden.
A majority of Americans disapprove of Mr. Biden’s performance, and polls show that voters who disapprove of him cite immigration more than any other policy issue.
On his trip Thursday to Brownsville, Mr. Biden plans to meet with the Border Patrol, law enforcement and local officials, according to Karin Jean-Pierre, a spokeswoman for Mr. Biden. Mr. Biden did not directly answer a reporter’s question on Monday about whether he would meet with immigrants.
The president is expected to blame the immigration crisis on House Republicans, who have blocked a bipartisan package that would have imposed strict border restrictions, and call on Congress to come together and face the challenge.
Mr. Biden said he had planned the visit without knowing that Mr. Trump would also be traveling to the border.
“I planned it for Thursday. What I didn’t know was that my good friend is obviously going to go,” Mr. Biden told reporters during a trip to New York, making an apparent reference to Mr. Trump.
Mr. Biden has been considering executive actions that would effectively bar border crossers from seeking asylum, but Ms. Jean-Pierre did not specify any new policies she would implement.
“Leaving is an action,” he said. “He takes it very seriously.”
Mr Trump will visit Eagle Pass in Texas on Thursday. CNN reported the planned trip last week.
Mr. Trump plans to make remarks from the border to highlight the immigration crisis and lay the blame at Mr. Biden’s feet, according to a person close to Mr. Trump who was not authorized to discuss the plans publicly.
Mr. Trump is expected to highlight crimes committed by immigrants in New York and other cities, as well as the arrest of an undocumented immigrant from Venezuela in the recent high-profile killing of a 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia. added.
On Monday, after Mr Biden’s visit was announced, Mr Trump sought to blame his rival for the killing, writing on his social media site: “When I am your President, we will immediately seal the borders, we will stop the invasion , and on day one, we will begin the largest operation to deport illegal CRIMINALS in American History!”
Mr. Biden’s visit to Brownsville, which has historically felt the effects when illegal crossings rise, comes as the White House tries to pivot its political strategy on the border. For much of his tenure, Mr. Biden and his aides have avoided talking publicly about the border, even though his top aides were warned early on that the immigration crisis could erode his support among voters.
Facing calls to visit the border in 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris described the move as a “big gesture” and said she was more focused on dealing with key immigration cases, but ultimately bowed to pressure and visited El Paso.
Mr. Biden’s aides have spent months debating whether to implement more border enforcement policies to deal with the surge in immigration as Republicans have accused Mr. Biden of being weak on border security.
But after denouncing Mr. Biden for months across the border, House Republicans scrapped the bipartisan immigration bill, in part because Mr. Trump did not want Mr. Biden to win a political victory.
Senior aides to Mr. Biden believe the opposition allowed the White House to go ahead with the attack and accuse Republicans of simply playing border politics and failing to defuse the crisis. Democratic officials also pushed the White House to attack Republicans for walking away from a package that included the kind of restrictions that even Trump’s allies have been calling for for years.
“The border is a mess,” Mr. Biden told donors last week in California’s Los Altos Hills. “They don’t have the staff.” He said Republicans won’t even give the government the money “for the machines to detect the fentanyl coming in.”
“It’s not about what it says about political courage, it’s about what it says about the state of the party,” Mr. Biden said.
The executive order Mr. Biden is considering would close the border to new arrivals if more than 5,000 immigrants a day tried to cross illegally during a week, or more than 8,500 tried to cross in a given day. It is likely to be blocked by the courts, but even passing such a provision would allow the White House to deflect accusations that it is dodging the crisis and continue to put pressure on Republicans to reach a legislative compromise.
Its whereabouts, however, are uncertain. In a White House meeting with governors on Friday during the National Governors Association conference, Mr. Biden told the governors that his lawyers told him he could not use the kinds of measures Mr. Trump had, according to with two people familiar with the observations. It was not clear specifically which authority he was referring to.
“There is no executive action that would do what the bipartisan proposal that the Senate negotiated would do,” Ms. Jean-Pierre said. “There was a deal that came out of the Senate in a bipartisan way that took four months. “The Republicans got in the way because of what Donald Trump told them to do.”
By making the visit to the border, the White House appeared to hope to avoid the kind of political backlash it faced when Mr. Biden took about a year to visit East Palestine, Ohio, after a Norfolk Southern train derailed and a toxic mess spills out. in the small town.
Mr. Trump filled the void, visiting the community in February 2023 in the weeks after the derailment, fueling accusations that Mr. Biden had neglected the crisis.
