Trump visited the border area with Mexico in the town of Eagle Pass, Texas (Getty)

WASHINGTON

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President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump visited the US-Mexico border on Thursday, as the two candidates most likely to face each other in the November 2024 election sought to blame the other for hundreds of thousands of migrants crossing in pictures. Illegal borders.

Biden and Trump's visit comes at a time when the number of migrants arrested at official border crossings along the US-Mexico border has declined, after a record high last December.

Border Guard officers arrested nearly 250,000 migrants in December 2023, and this number decreased sharply in January to about 124,000, mainly due to cold weather, and it is expected that the numbers of migrants will rise again with the start of... spring season.

President Biden headed to the city of Brownsville, where the number of immigrants entering has decreased since the beginning of the year.

On the other hand, 300 miles from Brownsville, Trump visited the Eagle Pass area, which is the densest crossing point in terms of the number of immigrants crossing the US border illegally.

Biden meets Border Patrol officers in Brownsville on the border with Mexico (French)

Biden blames Republicans

Biden, making his second visit to the border during his years in office, met with Border Patrol officers, law enforcement and local leaders, and blamed Republicans for blocking a bipartisan border deal in the Senate, which would have allowed the government to expel migrants if crossings exceeded a daily threshold of 4. Thousands of immigrants.

After months of negotiations, Republicans ultimately said the terms did not go far enough.

This visit comes as part of Democrats' efforts to focus more on immigration, which recent opinion polls show has become a top priority for voters.

In a poll conducted by Gallup in the first three weeks of last February, respondents confirmed that the immigration issue has become the most important problem facing the country over the past few months and years.

Due to bipartisan politicization of the immigration issue, Congress has failed for decades to pass bipartisan legislation on immigration and border security.

After three years of adopting a defensive policy in the face of Republican attacks, Democrats now see an opportunity to shift the blame to Republicans for not passing the Senate deal.

Biden's visit came a week before he delivers the State of the Union address on March 7, and at a time when the White House is studying unilateral measures it can take to stop illegal immigrants crossing the border.

Among the ideas proposed: Preventing immigrants who cross the border illegally from seeking asylum, allowing them to be quickly deported to Mexico or their countries of origin.

Any executive action would face legal hurdles, as Trump sought to impose a nearly similar ban in 2018, but a federal court blocked it, saying it was a violation of asylum laws, which allow people to seek humanitarian protection regardless of how they entered the country.

Trump attacks Biden

The Biden campaign said in a statement before his arrival in Texas, “The American people know the truth. President Trump’s policies created the safest borders in American history, and Joe Biden is the one who reversed them.”

Trump delivered a speech in Shipley Park, which has become a flashpoint in Texas' confrontation with the federal government, where he attacked Biden, criticized his handling of the border issue, and linked the influx of migrants to crime.

The former US president said, "These are the people who come to our country. They come from prisons, they come from mental institutions, and some of them are terrorists. They are taken to our country. This is a terrible thing."

Trump's tone did not differ from his usual anti-immigrant rhetoric that he used in his candidacy campaigns in 2016 and 2020.

Trump praised Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who accuses the Biden administration of failing to secure the border, and argues that the US Constitution gives them the right to “self-defense” to protect against “invasion,” in this case immigrants.

The governor of Texas took an unprecedented step to secure the state's borders through hundreds of the state's National Guard. He also ordered the construction of a permanent military base near Eagle Pass sufficient to host 2,300 government soldiers, who would be ready to confront any crises of the influx of migrants at the border.

The Biden administration believes that Texas's actions along the border are unnecessary and violate the Constitution, which grants the authority to manage the immigration file to the federal government only.

The iron wall separating the United States and Mexico did not prevent hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from crossing (Al Jazeera)

Democrats are pressing

The Biden administration has tried to achieve a balance by restricting asylum status - the status that most immigrants rely on after arriving on US soil - for some immigrants, while opening new legal options for other immigrants.

This approach has faced negative backlash from both the left and the right.

The attacks that Biden faces are not only from Trump and other Republicans, as Biden has come under pressure from progressive members of his party after they were disappointed by Biden’s shift to the right on immigration in recent months, after he carried out an intense campaign against Trump’s hard-line immigration policies in his 2020 election campaign. .

However, at the same time, many Democrats in Congress, in addition to mayors and mayors of cities and towns across the country, are pressuring Biden to adopt stricter border policies, after thousands of illegal immigrants arrived in their cities.

Only 29% of respondents in a recent NPR poll say they approve of the way Biden is handling the immigration issue.

It is worth noting that most opinion polls indicate that most Americans trust Republicans more than Democrats in securing the borders and dealing with the immigration issue.

Source: Al Jazeera