US Elections: The Road to the White House Starts at the Border | USA election

Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student, went for a run at the University of Georgia in Athens on Thursday, February 22. He never returned to his room. The same day she was found dead in a wooded area of ​​the campus. The next day, José Antonio Ibarra, a 26-year-old Venezuelan who crossed the border illegally in September 2022, was arrested and charged with murder. Then this tragic incident became a political weapon. “Corrupt Joe Biden’s border invasion is destroying our country and killing our citizens!” Former President Donald Trump wrote on his social network, Ibarra “monster.” Although studies deny a link between immigration and crime, Trump has revived the xenophobic script that paved his way to the White House in 2016. The border has become a battleground for the presidential election in November. The joint visit of Biden and Trump on the banks of the Rio Grande this Thursday attests to that.

The agenda for the November 5 election is loaded. The economy, abortion, insecurity, the age of President Biden, 81 (and to a lesser extent Trump, 77), threats to democracy, criminal charges against former presidents, and even foreign policy, which rarely moves. Voters will influence the outcome. Americans, however, see immigration as the nation’s top problem, according to a Gallup poll released this week. 28% of citizens (including 57% of Republicans), more than ever, cite it as the number one problem since the avalanche of illegal arrivals during the Biden presidency, which set a record 250,000 crossings last December.

The labor market absorbed labor (and needs) from abroad. Immigration partly explains the strength of the US economy and its unexpected resistance to rising interest rates. However, the large-scale arrival of immigrants has also led to the collapse of social services in many cities. Democratic mayors in cities like New York, Chicago and Denver have also sounded the alarm.

L Democrats are aware that immigration is a drag on Biden’s re-election. For this reason, the President has decided to go on the offensive, as his visit to Brownsville (Texas) this Thursday shows. Wearing a black cap and no tie, he accompanied Border Patrol agents to the banks of the Rio Grande, which serves as the natural border with Mexico. He also met with customs personnel, members of the asylum and reception services, and immigration judges.

About 500 kilometers away, Trump peered from behind a barbed-wire fence along the same river in Eagle Pass, which has become ground zero in the political battle over immigration control between the federal administration and Texas Governor Greg Abbott. The former President is visiting him.

Both agreed on the diagnosis. The immigration system is broken and the situation is unsustainable: “It’s very simple. It’s time to act. It’s past time to act,” Biden said, summarizing the root of the problem. “The process of reaching a decision on an asylum application takes five to seven years. You all know it here, but the rest of the country doesn’t understand it. It’s too long,” Biden said. “It encourages more people to come into the country,” he added.

Democrats and Republicans agreed on a bill that would provide more resources to immigration services and would, according to Biden, allow cases to be processed in six months. Immigrants are willing to pay the mafia thousands of dollars to move north because they know that arrival guarantees them a long stay. If the case is expedited, “it will have a serious deterrent effect on those who come in,” he told dozens of agents at the Brownsville Border Patrol command center. “Six months, seven years… two different things,” he highlighted. “They’re not going to pay the cartels thousands of dollars to make that trip knowing they’re going to get paid quickly.”

The rule would also give the president emergency authority to temporarily close the border when the number of crossings exceeds a certain threshold and exceeds the capacity of immigration services. However, when that legislation was on track to be approved, Republicans backed down under pressure from Trump. It allows Democrats to argue that their opponents don’t want a solution, but a problem that gives them an electoral advantage. “It was supposed to be approved. “Then, it was derailed by partisan politics,” Biden lamented in Brownsville before appealing directly to Trump.

“I understand that my predecessor is in Eagle Pass today. This is what I would say to Mr. Trump: Instead of playing politics with this issue, instead of asking members of Congress to block this legislation, join me, or I will join you, in passing this bipartisan border security bill to Congress. Will ask for permission, – he told him, appealing for reconciliation and an agreed solution.

Political commitment and respect for the law is not Trump’s idea. When the former president said a few months ago that, if re-elected, he would become a dictator for a day, immigration was one of the objectives: “We’re going to close the border and we’re going to drill, drill and drill. . . . Then, I’m not a dictator.†And just as in the 2016 campaign he accused Mexico of sending “rapists” and “criminals,” this time, Trump, the son, grandson and husband of immigrants, uses xenophobic rhetoric with echoes of Nazism in which Says immigrants are “poisoning the blood. of the country.”

In Eagle Pass, this Thursday, the former president used the Laken Riley murder to say that Biden “has (on his hands) the blood of countless innocent victims.” “The monster accused of death is an illegal alien immigrant who was allowed into our country and released into our communities by the corrupt Joe Biden,” he said.

After denouncing the killing as a heinous crime, Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of the immigrant advocacy organization America’s Voice, pointed out via email that “the way Trump is using this tactic “for political gain is disgusting.” It’s strategic racism; political A hackneyed tactic from the well-known playbook with the sole purpose of turning this tragedy into fodder for the cause and when the facts prove otherwise, migrants and asylum seekers are dangerous threats. “In study after study, the facts are clear: Immigrants have a lower crime rate than the rest of the population,” He adds.

The former president, however, is willing to take that strategy to the limit for his electoral advantage: “They come from prisons and they come from prisons and they come from mental institutions and they come from asylums and they are terrorists,” he said. Eagle pass. The United States is being invaded by Biden’s immigration crime. It is a new form of gross violation of our country,” he continued. Those who “invade”, he said, are “men of the fighting age” who look like “warriors”. “This is like a war,” he declared. .Of course, it is a political war.

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