Biden, Trump Make Dueling Visits to US-Mexico Border

U.S. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are making dueling campaign visits Thursday to the U.S.-Mexico border - each blaming the other for the chaos there - a key issue ahead of the November presidential election as tens of thousands of migrants pour into the United States each week.

Biden is headed to Brownsville, Texas, located in a region where illegal crossings into the U.S. have fallen sharply in recent years as local residents have banded together to help migrants assimilate into a new life in the United States.

Trump is going to Eagle Pass, Texas, a more volatile immigration venue about 500 kilometers (311 miles) away, where Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott has erected several types of barriers, including razor wire and rusted shipping containers, to curb the influx of migrants crossing the Rio Grande.

The White House said Biden will give an address and receive a briefing on the border situation from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

He wants Congress to approve more funding for border agents and asylum officers and says he may sign an executive order to impose more controls to close the border if Congress does not act. But an executive order does not have the same force of law as legislation approved by Congress and almost certainly would be challenged in lawsuits by pro-immigration groups.

As president from 2017 to early 2021, Trump sought to build a border wall and claimed Mexico would pay for it.

A portion of a wall was built on his watch, but Congress never gave Trump as much money as he wanted for the project and Mexico paid none of it.

At another point, Trump separated parents from their children as they tried to cross into the U.S. but abandoned the policy amid widespread outcries.

For years, immigration policy has long been the issue that Washington lawmakers endlessly debate but cannot ever come to a resolution on.

Republicans generally favor tougher rules to curb migrants from entering the U.S. while Democrats have often adopted a more nuanced approach, such as calling for permanent stay-in-the-U.S. rights for young adults who were brought into the U.S. illegally years ago by their migrant parents.

Most recently, three U.S. senators - a Democrat, a Republican and an independent - negotiated for months to draft new migration controls that would have been the toughest in years and won Biden's support, even as progressive Democrats complained it was something akin to what Trump would have proposed.

Trump nonetheless opposed the proposal, saying it was not tough enough and pushed Republicans to oppose it, which they did in defeating it in the Senate.

Democratic critics said Republicans supporting Trump's bid for another White House term rejected the proposal, so as not to hand Biden an election-year victory on the contentious issue.

Even as that legislative effort was defeated, House Speaker Mike Johnson, who leads the narrow Republican majority in the House of Representatives, has demanded that U.S.-Mexico border immigration controls be added to a $60 billion military aid package for Ukraine before he will put the package to a vote in the full House chamber.

Trump is close to securing the Republican presidential nomination for the third straight election cycle and has turned his attacks on Biden, with a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll showing immigration is the main concern for many voters and that Biden is vulnerable on the issue.

Meanwhile, House Republicans, by a single-vote margin, recently impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden's immigration chief, claiming that he has left the border in chaos and ignored existing immigration restraints.

A Senate trial is expected soon, but with Democrats controlling the chamber, Mayorkas's conviction and removal from office are highly unlikely.

One Trump aide said the fact that Biden is visiting the border on the same day as the former Republican president "shows just how big of a problem this is for him."