President Biden and former President Donald J. The Trumps 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 accusing the president of border lawlessness.
The remarks came at a moment of political peril for Mr. Biden, who has faced bipartisan criticism as the number of people crossing into the United States has reached record levels, with migrant encounters more than twice as many as in Trump years.
In appearances about 300 miles apart in Texas, Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump sought to capitalize on what is likely to become the most volatile political dispute of the 2024 campaign.
The president called on his predecessor to help pass a bipartisan bill in Congress that would significantly crack down on border crossings. Republicans, at Mr Trump’s urging, torpedoed the bill – legislation they had called for – saying it was not strong enough.
“Instead of telling members of Congress to block this legislation, join me,” Mr. Biden said in Brownsville, a border town in the Rio Grande Valley.
“You know and I know it’s the toughest, most effective, most effective border security bill this country has ever seen,” he said. “Instead of playing politics with the issue, why don’t we get together and do it.”
Mr. Biden’s words amounted to political boldness. But it was also an acknowledgment of Mr. Trump’s hold on the Republican Party, particularly when it comes to the border, at a time when many Americans say immigration is their top concern and don’t trust Mr. Biden to address it. .
In Eagle Pass, which has become a common stage for politicians looking 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 touring Shelby Park, where Gov. Greg Abbott has sent the Texas National Guard to police the border. Mr Trump said immigrants “look like warriors to me”, adding that “something is going on. It’s bad.” He also highlighted crimes committed by immigrants in an attempt to portray Mr. Biden as plunging the nation into crime and disorder.
Mr. Trump expressed his sadness over the death of Laken Riley, the 22-year-old who was found dead on the University of Georgia campus in Athens. The man accused of killing her is a Venezuelan immigrant who crossed the southern border in September 2022.
Even border officials who worked for Mr. Trump, however, said most migrants crossing the border are vulnerable families fleeing poverty and violence, not criminals.
Mr Trump plans an extreme expansion of his anti-immigration policies if he returns to office in 2025. He would plunge the country into mass deportations, build massive camps across the United States to hold undocumented immigrants and deny asylum applications based on claims that the applicants carry infections such as tuberculosis.
The Texas showdown was the latest indication of how divisive immigration has become in the United States. Any progress on the issue has hit a wall in Washington, where polarization in the country has prevented any compromise from lawmakers.
Even Mr. Biden’s choice of Brownsville has come under fire from Mr. Trump and his allies because the city has seen a recent drop in border crossings. They said Mr. Biden should have gone to a busier crossing. 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 it had encountered immigrants between ports of entry 124,220 times in January, up from 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 increased immigration around the world and Republicans who have tried to block 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 led smugglers and smugglers to send migrants to America under the false promise that the new president was opening the borders.
Even as Mr. Biden’s administration created legal pathways for immigrants and began to rebuild the refugee system, it began to embrace some of Mr. Trump’s more restrictive tactics.
Although Mr. Biden is still calling on Congress to pass a border bill, he is considering executive action that would accomplish something similar — limiting asylum at the border. The move would close the border to new arrivals if more than 5,000 migrants a day tried to cross illegally during a week, or more than 8,500 tried to cross in a day. (Republicans say those numbers are still too high.)
The administration has argued that congressional legislation would be less likely than executive action to face a legal challenge.
Democrats worried about damaging immigration policy see a possible path forward with a tougher approach after Tom Suozzi, a former Democratic congressman, won a special election for the House of Representatives in New York last month.
Mr. Suozzi has taken a hard line on the border, calling for them to be closed and challenging Republicans on issues that usually dominate, such as immigration.
Mr. Biden will face an uphill task in overcoming Mr. Trump among voters who care strongly about illegal immigration. Mr. Biden spent most of the 2020 campaign attacking Trump for his anti-immigration agenda and took office pledging 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 immigrants turned away by the former president. He wrote in an opinion essay in 2020 that Mr. Biden would “restore asylum protections.”
Representative Vicente Gonzalez, D-Texas, said Thursday that despite Mr. Biden’s stronger stance on immigration, he did not place the president in the same category as Mr. Trump.
“I still think they are very different,” said Mr. Gonzalez, who joined Mr. Biden on his tour. “I mean, we’re not going to take children from the arms of mothers and separate families and lock up children, but we’re going to put order at the border.”
