President Joe Biden and Donald Trump visit the Texas border to offer competing solutions to immigration crisis
The two likely 2024 presidential candidates made duelling visits to offer competing solutions to Americans’ number one concern.
Joe Biden and Donald Trump have made duelling visits to the Texas border in a bid to blame each other for out-of-control illegal immigration, an issue that’s shot to the top of Americans’ concerns days before the Super Tuesday primary contests.
After months of political rancour following an unprecedented surge in illegal arrivals – 3.2 million in the 12 months to 1st October last year, including 2.5 million on the southern border – Mr Biden made his second visit to the border as president, seeking to cauterise a growing political problem for Democrats in a presidential election year.
“Folks it’s real simple—it’s time to act. It’s well past time to act,” Biden said, speaking at Brownsville, Texas, around 450km from Donald Trump, who visited Eagle Pass, where thousands of illegal immigrants a day have been pouring into the US.
“Instead of telling members of Congress to block this legislation, join me,” the president added, referring to Mr Trump’s excoriation of an immigration bill the Senate had passed last month but most Republicans opposed, in large part owing to Mr Trump’s trenchant opposition.
The Border Patrol agents, law enforcement officers, and asylum officers I met with today reiterated what we already know:
— President Biden (@POTUS) March 1, 2024
They desperately need more resources – more agents, judges, equipment – to secure our border.
We could answer that with our bipartisan border security deal. pic.twitter.com/3yE4ggf0Gr
The short-lived bill, which congressional Republicans had demanded in return for their support for extra foreign aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, included an emergency expulsion authority that would have kicked in once daily encounters exceeded 4,000 a day.
“You know and I know it’s the toughest, most efficient, most effective border security bill this country has ever seen,” the president said of a bill he was willing to sign.
Mr Trump, who almost certainly will emerge as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in July, has blasted the bill as too soft, praising his own policies as president which had seemingly reduced arrivals to fewer than 1 million in each of the years of his administration.
“This is a Joe Biden invasion… Now the United States is being overrun by the Biden migrant crime,” he said, in a fresh attempt to tie reports of a spate of violent crimes committed by illegal immigrants, including a murder of a 2 year old in Maryland last week.
The extraordinary surge in arrivals, including immigrants from China, Russia and practically every South American country, has triggered a nationwide political revolt, including from Democrats in New York and Illinois, furious with an influx of illegal migrants bussed to their ‘sanctuary cities’ paid for by Republican states that have cost state coffers billions.
Texas governor Greg Abbott, who appeared alongside Mr Trump on Thursday (Friday AEDT), has led the southern Republican states’ political assault on the federal government’s relaxation of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, his officials constructing their own razor wire fence along the border, which federal authorities have tried to cut down.
Our country is dealing with more deadly consequences than we have in our entire lifetime due to President Biden’s open border policies.
— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) March 1, 2024
Proud to have President Trump on the border today supporting Texas’ historic border security efforts.
Texas will continue to hold the line. pic.twitter.com/A4IwaJ4PLH
After criticising Mr Trump’s border policy for years, Mr Biden’s administration in an embarrassing shift is now openly exploring how to curb the influx using the sort of executive orders Mr Trump employed as president, which included compelling asylum seekers to stay in Mexico until their claims were processed.
A new Gallup poll conducted over the first three weeks of February found immigration had surpassed inflation as the most important problem facing the country, including a jump in the share who ranked it first compared to a month ago.
“We have to deport a lot of people, and they have to start immediately,” Mr Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity in an interview from Eagle Pass, referring to a policy idea the White House has called ““racist, un-American, and ineffective.”
According to a RAND analysis, the influx has overwhelmed US immigration authorities to the point where, on average, court dates for asylum cases were now four years out in the future.
“Over 3 million cases were pending before immigration courts near the end of 2023, with the backlog growing by 1 million since 2022,” it said.
The two leaders scheduled their visits days ahead of the Super Tuesday primaries next week, when voters in 15 states head to the polls to pick the favoured presidential candidates.
Neither Biden nor Trump met with any migrants in Texas.
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