On border visit, Biden and Trump will focus on different priorities

U.S. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump will make separate visits to the U.S. southern border on Thursday to highlight their competing short-term priorities in dealing with what they both regard as a serious immigration crisis.

Biden will travel to Brownsville, a city of 187,000 people in the southernmost tip of Texas that is one of the main legal ports of entry for immigrants seeking asylum and living and working in the United States.

There, he will meet with federal immigration enforcement officials, law enforcement officials and local leaders. He may also call on Congress to pass a bipartisan immigration reform bill negotiated in the Senate that has been blocked by Republicans.

Trump will travel to Eagle Pass, another town hundreds of kilometers north of Texas that has been inundated with migrants trying to cross the border illegally. Many of them also seek asylum, often taking refuge in and around towns before moving further into the country’s interior to await processing.

Trump is expected to make remarks denouncing border security conditions and blaming Biden for the problem. Trump is also likely to discuss a bipartisan Senate-drafted immigration proposal that he has criticized and asked Republican lawmakers to refuse to support.

immigration crisis

Migration across the southern border has increased dramatically in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic. Data for all of 2023 show Customs and Border Protection officers had more than 2.4 million encounters with immigrants at the southern border last year, a record high. CBP also tracks so-called “escapees,” people who are observed crossing the border by CBP officers or surveillance equipment but are not arrested. Since 2021, the agency has identified at least 1.7 million escapes.

Of the millions of people who have come into contact with border officials while crossing, many have requested asylum, triggering a process that requires immigration officials to evaluate their applications. The current backlog of asylum cases is years long, with large numbers of asylum seekers being released into the interior of the United States while waiting for their cases to be heard.

Polls show the situation at the border is of serious concern to many Americans. The Pew Research Center recently found that 77% of Americans believe the border situation poses a “crisis” or “major problem.” While this feeling is most pronounced among respondents who identify as Republicans, at around 90%, it is also felt by a majority of those who identify as Democrats, at 66%.

Legal Issues

In recent months, perhaps in response to public concerns, Biden has stepped up his rhetoric on the topic, labeling the situation a “crisis” and calling for new legislation that would tighten his restrictions on people entering the United States. Ability

Many Republicans believe the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952 empowers the president to deal with the immigration crisis. Under the law, the president may “suspend the admission of all applicants or classes of applicants as immigrants or nonimmigrants or impose any restrictions on the admission of applicants that he deems appropriate.”

However, the Biden administration noted that the most recent Refugee Act of 1980 obligates the president to provide due process to individuals requesting asylum in the United States “regardless of that person’s immigration status or whether he or she is lawfully admitted to the country.”

glimmer of hope

For a brief period a few weeks ago, it seemed possible for Washington to make real progress on immigration. As Democrats press for a supplemental funding bill to support Ukraine in its fight against Russia, Republicans say any such bill is unlikely unless paired with major immigration reform.

In the Senate, a bipartisan group of lawmakers drafted a bill to provide funding for Ukraine. In exchange, Democrats agreed to some major Republican demands for border security.

Among other things, it would make it more difficult for migrants to file asylum claims, significantly increase the ability of border agencies to detain migrants, and give the president the power to block all crossings on days when migrant flows exceed established limits.

However, Republican opposition to the deal emerged in January, with the support of Trump, who criticized the deal as insufficient on his social media network Truth Social, writing: “I don’t think we are at all There should be a border deal unless we get everything we need to stop millions of people from invading our once great and soon to be great again country, many from places unknown!”

It soon became apparent that many Republicans, including Trump, saw the border as an important issue in the 2024 elections and were unwilling to pass anything Biden could use to demonstrate that he was taking action on the issue. legislation.

Very few options left

William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program, said Republicans’ reluctance to pass immigration reform in Congress leaves Biden with few options to demonstrate he is taking action on the issue.

“It’s no secret that he’s between a rock and a hard place,” Galston told VOA. “Because if he wants to do something quickly, he has to take some kind of executive action, and that limits his options.”

Goldston added, “Biden’s challenge is to find executive actions that will make a difference in the border conflict — and equally importantly, that will be seen as enabling by the American people — without running afoul of existing laws. limits. ”

For example, Biden could issue an executive order that would make it difficult or impossible for individuals who are in the country illegally to apply for asylum. However, similar executive actions taken by Trump while in office were quickly blocked by federal courts.

The price of inaction

Greg Chen, senior director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said treating the border crisis as a political football comes with real human costs.

He said the United States is now on the receiving end of an unprecedented surge in migration in the history of the Western Hemisphere, with millions fleeing countries with collapsing economies and rule of law, making flying north to the United States the only viable option for many.

“Without increasing the capacity to process people arriving at the southern border and increasing the capacity of the broader immigration system, we’re going to see massive backlogs across the board,” Chen told VOA. “Hopefully get legal relief and the opportunity to prove Asylum seekers and other immigrants who should be able to stay in the United States are waiting longer.”

Chen said many asylum seekers trying to enter through legal ports of entry spent days sleeping in lines that stretched into areas of Mexico plagued by violence and often controlled by drug cartels.

“The border needs urgent attention now to ensure that people traveling to the United States are processed more efficiently, orderly, and in a fair and humane manner,” he said.