Joe Biden, Donald Trump clashing visits thrust border fight further into spotlight:-Texas’s Brownsville President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump finally got into a fight on Thursday, but it wasn’t in a debate hall. Instead, it happened on two very different parts of the U.S.-Mexico border.
Joe Biden, Donald Trump clashing visits thrust border fight further into spotlight
Both candidates, who are likely to run against each other again in November, paid separate visits to the southern border in Texas to bring attention to immigration and border security, which are now the most important issues for voters. The visits were like a battle of looks, if not details.
Biden asked Trump to join him in asking Congress to pass broad border security legislation that was worked out by a group of Democratic and Republican senators. The House GOP turned it down at Trump’s request.
“Why don’t we just work together on it instead of letting politics get in the way?” Biden said it from Brownsville, in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.
At about the same time, Trump was talking in Eagle Pass, 325 miles away. He didn’t want to work with Biden or the Democrats for that matter. He called his successor names and said that Biden was the only one to blame for the immigration problem and couldn’t handle it well.
“This is a Joe Biden invasion,” Trump said from Shelby Park, which is on the Rio Grande and has become the center of the national discussion about immigration. Over the past three years, Biden has been coming here a lot. “He is a terrible president, probably the worst president our country has ever had and the least qualified president we’ve ever had.”
Biden and Trump are both making stops, but only eight months before the election in November. Polls show that Americans are very worried about what’s happening at the border.
This week, a Gallup Poll showed that Americans now think immigration is the most important problem the US is facing. This is the first time in ten years that Americans have thought this. At the beginning of February, a different poll by the Pew Research Center found that 80% of Americans think the government is not handling the big number of migrants at the border well.
Another poll done in February by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas found that most Texans want to see more border patrol and support Gov. Greg Abbott’s plans to make the border safer, such as erecting fences and razor wire along the Rio Grande.
‘We can’t afford not to do this’
In Brownsville, Biden’s motorcade went on a road next to a 20-foot-tall border fence, which was right on the border between the United States and Mexico. The group drove through a fence gate and down a rough dirt road where Trump flags were flying from stopped cars.
Biden walked along a part of the border and then met with federal immigration agents, who told him in detail about efforts to stop people from crossing illegally. Brownsville used to be the busiest place in the country for illegal landings, but the number of people coming into the US illegally has dropped sharply in recent months.
During his speech at the Brownsville country Patrol Station, Biden said that more resources are needed right away to make the country safer. The bill that House Republicans killed had money in it to hire more border patrol agents and buy more technology and tools for security checks.
“This is something we have to do,” Biden said.
A group of about three hundred mostly Biden fans stood on Boca Chica Boulevard outside of the city’s airport before Biden arrived. They waved blue Biden flags and chanted “Four more years!” People from all over the country parked along the boulevard for about a half mile, waving U.S. flags and trying to see the president.
At the age of 71, Elia Zamora-Hernandez went 30 miles from Harlingen to show her support. She wore a Biden cap and waved a Biden flag and said that Republicans are not working with Biden enough to let him do his job.
“There has been a problem at the border for years and years,” Zamora-Hernandez said. There’s no way he made this.
Groups organized by La Union del Pueblo Entero, a group that fights for the rights of immigrants and workers, shouted, “Listen up! We’re in the fight!” farther down the street. (Listen, Biden—we’re having a hard time!) “¡Si se puede!” We can do it!
Victor Cavazos, who runs The Sidewalk School, a nonprofit in Reynosa, Mexico that helps people seeking asylum, said he didn’t understand why Biden didn’t meet with leaders of nongovernmental groups while he was in Texas.
He said, “He’s missing a big piece of the puzzle.” “We know what people in the field need.”
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Trump travels to Eagle Pass
Trump was in Eagle Pass with Abbott and troops from the Texas National Guard. The soldiers showed off the razor wire they put up along a 29-mile stretch of border on Abbott’s orders, even though the U.S. Supreme Court had told them not to.
While he was talking without notes, Trump went from praising himself to attacking California’s immigration policies to praising Abbott for being tough on the border. He said again, like he did in 2016, that “murderers” and “rapists” were coming into the US from Mexico.
“These are the people that are coming into our country and they’re coming from jails and they’re coming from prisons and they’re coming from mental institutions and they’re coming from insane asylums,” Trump stated. “And they’re terrorists and being let into our country.”
Trump also talked about Laken Riley, a nursing student of 22 years who was found dead in the woods at the University of Georgia in Athens last week. It was a guy from Venezuela who came to the U.S. illegally and was charged with killing the student.
The streets that lead down to Shelby Park were blocked off by city cops before Trump arrived. There were Trump and Biden supporters on all four sides of the intersection of Main Street and Commercial Street. There were also stores like Claudia’s Perfuma Fina and the Cowboy Corral, which sells western wear.
“We’ve seen two surges under two administrations, and it was better under Trump,” said Freddy Arellano, a junior at Sul Ross University who was wearing a Make America Great Again ball cap. “I can’t stand it under Biden.”
Attorney General Steve Fischer, who is in the other corner, said that Trump’s visit and Abbott’s policies at the border were “a big joke” and “political theatrics.”
As a metaphor and in real life, Jose Hernandez, who was in the Army and wore a Vietnam heroes cap, was in the middle.
He said, “I’m split down the middle between Biden and Trump.” “Anyone who can fix it.”
Hernandez said he would vote for Biden again in 2020, but the president hasn’t earned his support for a second term yet.
The head of the League of United Latin American Citizens, Domingo Garcia, was happy that Biden and Trump would be visiting.
Davis said, “They’re a little late.” “But hey, at least they’re finally paying attention to a crisis that has been going on for years.”
Garcia said that border and immigration problems will be very important in the November election, and that Latino voters will be a big part of that group.
The speaker said, “I think that shows that they both know how important immigration is and that the Latino communities are the way to the White House.”
Will Trump, Biden’s visits to the border shift the conversation?
As unprecedented numbers of people cross the U.S. border, no one in the White House, Congress, or on the campaign trail has a solution.
Biden urged Mexico and regional countries to stop migrant flows north. Biden has built legal avenues to discourage illegal border crossings. He’s given weak nations money to examine why people depart.
Trump wants barbed wire, fencing, and mass deportations at the border. Republicans in Congress want to severely limit asylum access.
However, northward migrations continue at a pace that worries many Americans. A once-impassable jungle between North and South America is now a human highway. Half a million individuals cross the Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama each year, most of them heading to the U.S.
“Nobody has figured out how to deal with this in a short-term way with the existing tools,” said Washington Office on Latin America defense oversight director Adam Isacson. “The most they’ve done is tweak policies to lower numbers for a few months, then they recover.”
Immigration push-and-pull dynamics have outweighed legal avenues at the U.S. border and 30-foot fences and razor wire.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the US has over 9 million job opportunities, attracting workers. Meanwhile, the pandemic’s economic impact is felt across the hemisphere.
“You have the United States in a moment of relative domestic stability with more job openings than workers,” ISACSON added. “Economies in the region haven’t recovered from COVID-19. Repressive governments, climate change, and gangs abound. You have a dysfunctional U.S. asylum system where you can claim fear and stay for four or five years.”
The number of migrants crossing the U.S. border dropped in the first year of the Trump administration before rising in 2018 and more than doubling in 2019. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic curtailed travel across the western hemisphere, reducing migration and U.S. border apprehensions.
As the pandemic subsided and regional economy struggled, unprecedented numbers of individuals crossed the U.S. border.
US Customs and Border Protection reported 1.7 million Southwest border migrant encounters in fiscal 2021, 2.4 million in 2022, and 2.5 million in 2023.
Tens of thousands of families crossing the Rio Grande in Texas or waiting to be vetted by Border Patrol at the border fence in Arizona or California have captivated American voters and raised concerns about the federal government’s ability to vet so many people and American cities’ ability to welcome them.
Abbott has transported over 100,000 migrants from Texas to New York, Chicago, and Denver, bringing humanitarian disasters to America.
In Texas federal court, a border struggle was underway before Biden and Trump arrived.
Thursday, U.S. District Judge David Alan Ezra preliminarily blocked Texas from making crossing the Texas-Mexico border a criminal. Ezra wrote in his injunction that “states may not exercise immigration enforcement power except as authorized by the federal government.”
Senate Bill 4, slated to take effect March 5, would have allowed Texas law enforcement to arrest, imprison, and deport unlawful border crossers.
In the order, Ezra stated that immigration surges are neither a ‘invasion’ under the Constitution, nor is Texas participating in war by executing SB4.
“To allow Texas to permanently supersede federal directives on the basis of an invasion would nullify federal law and authority, which is antithetical to the Constitution and has been rejected by federal courts since the Civil War,” he added.