By SEUNG MIN KIM, JILL COLVIN and COLLEEN LONG (Associated Press)
BROWNSVILLE, Texas (AP) — On the banks of the identical Rio Grande however 300 miles aside, President Joe Biden and GOP challenger Donald Trump on Thursday surveyed the U.S.-Mexico border and tussled from a distance over who’s in charge for the nation’s damaged immigration system and find out how to repair it.
Immigration has emerged as a central concern within the 2024 presidential marketing campaign, which is extensively anticipated to be a Biden-Trump rematch, and every man is in search of to make use of the border issues to his personal political benefit.
Their itineraries had been remarkably comparable: They arrived in Texas inside a half-hour of each other. Each selected an optimum location from which to make his level, acquired a briefing on operations and points, walked alongside the scrub brush by the Rio Grande and spoke on to the general public. Their remarks even overlapped in time for a bit.
But that’s the place the parallels ended.
Biden sought to highlight the need of a bipartisan border safety invoice that was tanked by Republicans on Trump’s orders, and flat-out requested the Republican front-runner to hitch him in supporting a congressional push for extra funding and tighter restrictions.
“Here’s what I would say to Mr. Trump,” Biden mentioned. “Instead of playing politics with the issue, join me, or I’ll join you in telling the Congress to pass this bill. You know and I know it’s the toughest, most efficient, most effective border security bill this country’s ever seen.”
Biden went to the Rio Grande Valley metropolis of Brownsville, which for 9 years was the busiest hall for unlawful crossings. The numbers have dropped in latest months, which officers credited partly to Mexico for stepping up its personal border safety. The go to was a nod to how the Biden administration views migration: as a regional and international concern, not only a U.S. downside.
The president walked alongside the Rio Grande and acquired a prolonged briefing from Homeland Security officers, who spoke bluntly about what they wanted to do their jobs successfully — briefly, extra money to rent extra officers alongside the border and to be used throughout the asylum course of to assist filter large backlogs.
“I want the American people to know what we’re trying to get done,” Biden mentioned. “We can’t afford not to do this.”
Trump merely blamed Biden.
He traveled to Eagle Pass, roughly 325 miles northwest of Brownsville, within the hall that’s at the moment seeing the most important variety of migrant crossings. He met with Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and Texas National Guard troopers who’ve commandeered an area park and put up razor wire fencing on the river’s edge to maintain migrants from crossing illegally. The park has grow to be a Republican image of defiance in opposition to the federal authorities.
“This is like a war,” Trump mentioned.
Gazing out over the river by way of the razor wire, Trump raised his fist and waved and shouted to individuals on the Mexico facet, who waved again. Then, he declared that migrants arriving to the border had been criminals and a few had been terrorists, a dialed-up model of the accusations he typically used in the course of the 2016 marketing campaign. This time, he’s began to harness rhetoric as soon as utilized by Adolf Hitler to argue migrants are poisoning the blood of America.
“They’re being let into our country and it’s horrible,” Trump mentioned. “It’s horrible.”
Trump additionally introduced up the killing of a 22-year-old nursing pupil in Georgia just lately. The suspect is a Venezuelan migrant.
“Crooked Joe has the blood of countless innocent victims,” Trump mentioned. “It’s so many stories to tell, so many horrible stories.”
Despite Trump’s claims, many research have discovered immigrants are much less drawn to violent crime than native-born residents. One revealed by the National Academy of Sciences, based mostly on Texas Department of Public Safety knowledge from 2012 to 2018, reported native-born U.S. residents had been greater than twice as more likely to be arrested for violent crimes as individuals within the nation illegally.
As the politicians traded barbs over who was in charge, migrants had been nonetheless making the harmful journey into the U.S. Trump stood on a concrete boat launch the place a day earlier, a person had been pulled from the river, drowned, making an attempt to cross. In Brownsville the place Biden spoke, a gaggle of migrants had crossed illegally in a single day.
Across the border from Brownsville, in Matamoros, makeshift shelters dotted the bottom for migrants who hope to come back to the U.S.
“I come completely alone on this journey, I have been on this journey for about six months and the only important thing I have in my life are my mom, my little sister and nobody else,” Joseph Elián Gutierrez Castillo, a Nicaraguan migrant, mentioned in Spanish. “With God’s favor everything will go well.”
The variety of people who find themselves illegally crossing the U.S. border has been rising for years, for causes that embody local weather change, warfare and unrest in different nations, the economic system, and cartels that see migration as a money cow.
Migrants ask for asylum whether or not they come illegally or by way of ports of entry; in some circumstances they’re turned away due to present insurance policies, however many households are allowed into the U.S., the place they typically wait years for a courtroom date to find out whether or not they can keep.
The administration’s method has been to pair crackdowns on the border with rising authorized pathways for migrants designed to steer individuals into arriving by aircraft with sponsors, not illegally on foot to the border. The numbers of migrants flowing throughout the U.S-Mexico border have far outpaced the capability of an immigration system that has not been considerably up to date in a long time.
Arrests for unlawful crossings fell by half in January, however there have been document highs in December.
Since the president was final on the border a 12 months in the past, the talk over immigration in Washington has shifted additional to the appropriate, with Democrats more and more wanting to embrace border restrictions now that migrants are sleeping in police stations and airplane hangars in main U.S. cities with out the power to legally work.
During bipartisan talks on the deal that may have toughened entry for migrants and funded enforcement and immigration courtroom, Biden himself mentioned he’d be keen to “shut down the border” proper now, ought to the deal move.
The talks seemed promising for some time. But Trump, who didn’t need to give Biden a political win on one in every of his signature marketing campaign points, satisfied Republicans to kill the deal. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., declared the deal lifeless on arrival.
Republicans declare Biden has the facility he wants to repair the problem, however absent legislative motion, any main coverage adjustments are more likely to be challenged or held up in courtroom. Under Trump, too, new hardline insurance policies had been typically held up or stopped by the courts.
Among voters, worries about immigration are rising on each side of the political divide, which may very well be particularly problematic for Biden.
According to an AP-NORC ballot in January, the share of voters involved about immigration rose to 35% from 27% final 12 months. Fifty-five p.c of Republicans say the federal government must give attention to immigration in 2024, whereas 22% of Democrats listed immigration as a precedence. That’s up from 45% and 14%, respectively, from December 2022.
Trump has laid out up to date immigration proposals that may mark a dramatic escalation of the method he utilized in workplace and that drew alarms from civil rights activists and quite a few courtroom challenges.
Some of these embody reviving and increasing a journey ban, imposing “ideological screening” for migrants, terminating all work permits and slicing off funding for shelter and transportation for people who find themselves within the nation illegally.
___
Associated Press writers Valerie Gonzalez in Brownsville, Texas, Alexis Triboulard in Mexico City and Michelle Price in New York contributed to this report.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”