Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are heading to the border. The pair will be holding dueling rallies to discuss the ongoing crisis.
The number of illegal immigrants that have crossed the border crossed a shocking milestone last month. America’s News Brief wrote that “Joe Biden’s open border policy has sparked a surge in illegal immigration never seen before to the United States. 7.3 million migrants have illegally come into the country over the southwest border during President Biden’s term,” according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which has already reported almost a million new entrants since January 1, 2024.
NBC News offered details about the two rallies.
It’s Biden’s second trip to the border since he took office. His first was to El Paso in January 2023. This time, he’s set to visit Brownsville, a border town in the Rio Grande Valley that has long felt the impacts of migration up close.
“He wanted to show that it was important for him to go down there, to hear from Border Patrol agents, to hear from first responders,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a briefing Wednesday. Biden will also deliver remarks to urge congressional Republicans to pass more border security funding, a White House official said.
Still, critics of the administration point out that Biden is visiting Brownsville at a time when the direst consequences of the migrant influx have shifted elsewhere. According to Customs and Border Protection, the federal agency that includes the Border Patrol, many more immigrants are now crossing at other parts of the border, such as Arizona and Eagle Pass, Texas.
Eagle Pass is where Trump is expected to visit. He has visited the border many times before — and he announced his trip before the White House did. Biden said this week that he’d been planning to go but that he didn’t know “his good friend” would be there the same day. Two senior administration officials said the timing of the trip was meant to maximize its political impact a week before the State of the Union address. One of the officials said “we welcome the split screen” with Trump.
Just over a year ago, Biden had the Border Patrol create what was labeled a “Potemkin Village” in El Paso in a sickening attempt to downplay the fact that the population of Pittsburgh enters the United States illegally every month.
The Border Patrol Union lambasted Biden’s photo op. Writing in Fox News, president of the National Border Patrol Council said, “Trump’s team strategically released his intentions to visit the border. The leak elicited the exact response he was hoping for from Biden. The knee-jerk reaction from Biden set in motion a border visit that saw him put together a trip to the safe haven of Brownsville, Texas.
Trump will be at Shelby Park, a location that Texas Governor Greg Abbott was forced to seize because of the rampant lawlessness fueled by the Biden administration’s policies. Biden will visit an extremely slow location in a very friendly Congressional district that historically hasn’t seen much illegal traffic, in large part due to the infrastructure Trump provided while in office, and more recently due to the immediate actions of Abbott after Biden took office.”
The union has not held its punches against Biden, claiming that his action on the border have been nothing short of disastrous.
We're just experiencing the tip of the iceberg with illegal alien crime in this country.
When Joe Biden's Titanic capsizes you're going to see the real damage he's done the last 3 years.
— Border Patrol Union – NBPC (@BPUnion) February 29, 2024
Biden is expected to arrive in Brownsville around 2:30 PM. Eastern time and deliver remarks at 4:30 PM. Trump’s campaign did not publicly release a schedule for his visit.
