President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are planning dueling trips to Texas border cities on Thursday as immigration becomes a key issue in their presidential rematch.
According to the Associated Press, Biden will travel to Brownsville on Thursday, where he will meet with border officials and discuss the need for bipartisan legislation. This will be his second visit to the border as president. The last time he visited the border was last year, when he traveled to El Paso in January.
On the other hand, Trump will travel to Eagle Pass, which is about 325 miles away from Brownsville. The city has become a central hotspot in the dispute between Texas and the federal government since state authorities took control of Shelby Park last month.
Republicans have long criticized Biden for his border policies, blaming him for the surge in illegal immigration across the southern border.
The White House, for its part, has said that GOP critics are more interested in exploiting the issue for political gain than working with the Biden administration to solve the problem.
Recently, the U.S. House of Representatives blocked a bipartisan border deal that would have given Biden the authority to close the border. House Republicans were criticized for killing the bill because it would have given Biden a political advantage over Trump.
“Republicans rejected this bipartisan agreement that came out of the Senate,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said. “That’s something that the president worked with in a bipartisan way, obviously, with Republicans and Democrats in the Senate for months. They rejected that.”
Meanwhile, Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Biden had three years to address the immigration issue.
“Now Biden’s handlers are sending him there on the same day as President Trump’s publicly reported trip, not because they actually want to solve the problem but because they know Biden is losing terribly,” Leavitt said.
Both Biden’s and Trump’s trips to the Texas border underscore the importance of the issue in the upcoming election.
According to a February poll by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas, both border security and immigration are the top two issues overall for Texas primary voters.
The number of illegal crossings into the U.S. has been increasing for years due to complex factors including climate change, war and insecurity in other nations, the economy, and drug trafficking. The number of migrants crossing the border has outpaced the capacity of the country’s immigration system, which hasn’t been updated in decades, and both presidential candidates are taking different approaches to addressing the problem.
Trump has adopted a more anti-immigrant discourse, saying that migrants are poisoning the blood of Americans, while Biden has proposed tougher executive actions that are not well-received by all Democrats.
Biden announced his trip after Trump’s plans were made public, but he told New York Times reporters he was unaware of this.
“I planned it for Thursday. What I didn’t know was that my good friend apparently is going,” Biden said.
