Biden will make a rare visit to the southern border on the same day as Trump

WASHINGTON – The President Joe Biden plans to make a rare visit to the southern border Thursday, his press secretary said, traveling to Brownsville, Texas, the same day the former president Donald Trump He already has a trip to the border planned.

The plans underscore the urgency now driving Biden and his team immigrationn, which has become one of his most serious political responsibilities.

Under the Biden administration, a number register of migrants crossed the southern border, a fact that Trump and Republicans have aggressively brandished against Biden.

Most Americans disapprove of Biden’s job performance, and polls show that voters who disapprove of him cite immigration as the reason more than any other political issue.

On his trip Thursday to Brownsville, Biden plans to meet the Border patrollaw enforcement and local officials, according to Karine Jean-Pierre, Biden’s press secretary.

Biden did not directly respond to a reporter’s question Monday about the possibility of meeting directly with migrants.

The president is expected to place blame for the immigration crisis on House Republicans, who blocked a bipartisan package that would have put in place tough border restrictions, and call on Congress to come together and address the challenge.

Biden said he had planned the visit without knowingr that Trump would also travel to the border.

“I had it scheduled for Thursday. What I didn’t know is that apparently my good friend is leaving,” Biden told reporters during a trip to New York, an apparent reference to Trump.

Biden has considered executive actions that would essentially prevent border migrants from seeking asylum, but Jean-Pierre did not specify any new policies he would implement.

“For him, going is an action,” he said.

“He’s taking this very seriously.”

Trump will visit Eagle Pass, Texas, on Thursday.

CNN reported on the planned trip last week.

Trump plans to make remarks from the border to highlight the immigration crisis and blame Bidenaccording to a person close to Trump who was not authorized to discuss the plans publicly.

Trump is expected to highlight crimes committed by immigrants in New York and other cities, as well as the arrest of a Venezuelan immigrant without legal status in the recent high-profile murder of a 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia.

On Monday, after Biden’s visit was announced, Trump attempted to blame his rival for the killing, writing on his social media: “When I am your president, immediately we will seal the borderwe will stop the invasion and start the operation on the first day deportation of illegal CRIMINALS largest in American history!

Biden’s visit to Brownsville, which has historically felt the effects of increased illegal crossings, comes as the White House attempts to center its political strategy on the border.

For much of his term, Biden and his advisers avoided speaking publicly about the border, even though his top advisers were warned early on that the migrant crisis could erode your support among voters.

Faced with invitations to visit the border in 2021, V.P Kamala Harris described the move as a “grand gesture” and said she was more focused on tackling major migration cases, but ultimately acquiesced to pressure and visited El Paso.

Biden’s advisers have spent months debating whether to implement more enforcement-oriented policies at the border to address the surge in migration, as Republicans accused Biden of being weak on border security.

But after months of denouncing Biden across the border, House Republicans ruined the bipartisan immigration bill, in part because Trump didn’t want Biden to get a political victory.

Biden’s top advisers believe the opposition has allowed the White House to attack and accuse Republicans of simply playing politics at the border and failing to alleviate the crisis.

Democratic officials also pushed the White House to attack Republicans for abandoning a package that included the kind of restrictions that Trump’s allies have also been calling for for years.

“The border is in chaos,” Biden told donors last week in Los Altos Hills, California.

“They don’t have the staff.”

He said Republicans wouldn’t even give the government money “for machines that can detect incoming fentanyl.”

“That’s not what it says about political courage; it’s about what it says about the state of the party,” Biden said.

The executive order Biden is considering would close the border to new arrivals if more than an average of 5,000 migrants a day attempted to cross illegally over the course of a week or more than 8,500 attempted to cross on a given day.

The courts are likely to block it, but even implementing such an order would allow the White House to deflect accusations that it is avoiding the crisis and continue to pressure Republicans to reach a legislative compromise.

However, his whereabouts are unknown.

In a White House meeting with governors Friday during the National Governors Association conference, Biden told governors that lawyers had told him that I couldn’t use it the kind of measures Trump has taken, according to two people familiar with the comments. It was not clear specifically which authority he was referring to.

“There is no executive action that would have done what the bipartisan proposal negotiated by the Senate would have done,” Jean-Pierre said.

“There was an agreement that came out of the Senate in a bipartisan manner that took four months. “Republicans got in the way because of what Donald Trump told them to do.”

By making the border visit, the White House appeared to hope to avoid the kind of political backlash it faced when Biden took about a year to visit East Palestine, Ohio, after a Norfolk Southern train derailed and spilled a toxic substance on the border. . small town.

Trump filled the void and visited the community in February 2023, in the weeks after the derailment, fueling accusations that Biden had neglected the crisis.

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