Biden unexpectedly announces trip to border with Mexico same day as Trump | International

Immigration has displaced the economy as the star issue in the political showdown between Republicans and Democrats. Eight months before the 2024 presidential election, the two potential candidates for the election will meet this Thursday at the Mexican border. Former President Donald Trump travels to Eagle Pass (Texas) to denounce what he calls an “attack” on immigrants. The current president, Joe Biden, will travel to Brownsville, Texas, about 500 kilometers away, across the Gulf of Mexico, to decry that Republicans are boycotting his proposals to secure the border to blame him.

It will be Biden’s second visit to the border as president, as he visited El Paso in January of last year. The White House announced the trip on Monday when it released its weekly schedule on Sunday without revealing the forecast. He did so after information about Trump’s visit was released this Thursday. Still, Biden has implied it was a coincidence: “I had it planned for Thursday, which I didn’t know my good friend was going to be gone, obviously,” he said, referring to Trump, when asked about the ice cream. The parlor in New York where he gave television interviews closed this Monday.

“On Thursday, as you all know, President Biden will meet with United States Border Patrol agents, law enforcement and local leaders in Brownsville, Texas,” White House spokeswoman Kerry said Monday. “It will speak to the Senate’s urgent need to approve a bipartisan agreement on border security, the most difficult and fair set of reforms to secure the border in decades,” he added. It is one of the hot spots for irregular border crossings.

Trump’s push has derailed a bill that included aid to Ukraine and Israel, but also reforms to curb illegal immigration at the border with Mexico, which has broken records during Biden’s presidency. Border measures have been a Republican demand to greenlight aid to Ukraine and Israel, but when push comes to shove, they have chosen to take a step back and continue to use migration flows as an electoral weapon.

For this reason, Biden, according to Jean-Pierre, will “reiterate his calls to Republican congressmen to stop playing politics and provide the necessary funding to increase the number of United States Border Patrol agents, more asylum officers, fentanyl detection technology and much more. More, ” he said this Monday.

Biden is analyzing the possibility of approving a decree with some measures to make the passage of immigrants more difficult or facilitate their deportation. When asked by reporters, a White House spokesman did not want to anticipate the content or schedule of a potential signing of this hypothetical executive order. “I have nothing to say at this moment. We’ll have more to share as we get closer to Thursday,” he replied.

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Among the measures being considered by Biden’s team is the exercise of authority under Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which gives the president broad latitude to bar the entry of certain immigrants if necessary. was “harmful” to the national interest. But if the law is not changed, any order against border crossing will be challenged in court.

Trump has repeatedly invoked that rule during his tenure, including his controversial entry ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries, which Biden rescinded as soon as he took office. It is now being analyzed whether the provision of the proposed law can be enforced when a certain number of illegal crossings are exceeded. The rule will activate the process of immediate repatriation of migrants at an average of more than 5,000 illegal daily crossings over a five-day period.

Jean-Pierre has stressed that Republicans and Democrats were negotiating what the legislation would achieve and that any decree that had enough support to move forward, before Trump’s push, would not achieve it. “We think Republicans should get out of the way, not politicize this. “This is an issue that concerns the American people, the majority of the American people,” he said. Democrats are trying to boomerang back against accusations about the border and immigration. “This was the toughest and fairest contract we have ever seen. And if it had become law, it would have made a difference,” he said.

Biden is going to hear directly from border patrol agents, the spokeswoman said, but she did not want to specify whether he would also meet with immigrants. Agents, he said, are “doing everything they can to secure the border with the resources they have,” but “they need more.”

Biden’s policy of trying to open legal avenues for orderly immigration to the United States while imposing harsh penalties against illegal ones has not stopped the flow of undocumented immigrants into the United States. The law allows immigrants to apply for asylum, regardless of how they arrive, and they arrive in such numbers that it overwhelms the capacity of an underfunded immigration system. It effectively allows immigrants to settle while their cases linger for years.

Arrests for illegal crossings fell in half in January, but hit an all-time high in December.

Trump, who had already made immigration central to his campaign in the 2016 elections, moves to Eagle Pass, which has become the center of a bitter battle, with constitutional implications, that pits the federal government against the Texas government over immigration controls. A convoy of supporters of the former president arrived there this month in support of Governor Greg Abbott, who has challenged Washington in an effort to wrest immigration control from federal authorities.

Trump often talks about immigrants at his rallies, sometimes somewhat disjointedly or falsely. “They come from everywhere: from South America, Asia and Africa. “They attack the police in Times Square (in New York) and the good people of South Carolina who visit Washington, where the marble columns of the monuments are covered with graffiti,” he said a few times. Days ago in South Carolina, the truth is missing.. “It’s crazy,” he added.

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