President Joe Biden visited the U.S.-Mexico border Thursday, hoping to turn what has been a major campaign vulnerability into a weapon, following the demise — at the request of rival Donald Trump — of a bipartisan proposal that would have imposed the toughest immigration rules in decades.
“The majority of Democrats and Republicans of both houses support this legislation, until someone came along and said: ‘Don’t do that, it will benefit the incumbent.’ That’s a hell of a way to do business in America for such a serious problem,” Biden said during a visit to Brownsville, Texas. “It’s time for the speaker and some of my Republican friends in Congress who are blocking this bill to show a little spine.”
Earlier this month, the former president pressured his GOP allies to scuttle a sweeping immigration deal negotiated by the White House and both Democratic and Republican senators. Had it passed, it would have made it harder for migrants to claim asylum, increased the number of Border Patrol agents and improved detection of drugs being smuggled in.
In opposing the bill, Trump told his supporters in the Senate and the House that any legislation that helped reduce the number of migrants flowing into the country from Mexico would help Biden’s re-election this November and should therefore be blocked.
The GOP presidential frontrunner made his own visit to the Texas border Thursday coinciding with Biden’s.
“The United States is being overrun by Biden migrant crime,” he said during a stop at Eagle Pass, a point on the border that has seen the greatest number of crossings in recent months.
In his 15-minute remarks, Trump repeated many of the same lies on the topic that regularly feature in his rally speeches. He did not mention the border legislation, which he had previously bragged about stopping.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Republicans’ willingness to kill legislation they themselves had negotiated just because Trump demanded it showed that they were less interested in fixing problems than helping Trump win back the presidency.
“If this bill was able to get in, to become law, it would have been, yes, the toughest, but also the fairest that we have seen in some time,” she said Wednesday. “We believe we’re on the offense because we did the work with the Senate in a bipartisan way for four months. And Republicans rejected it.”
Biden campaign officials echoed that view in a call with reporters.
“Trump said ‘blame it on me.’ And so I will,” said Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a member of the campaign’s advisory board. “The same Republicans who helped write the thing — and were prepared to vote for it — suddenly opposed it. Why? Because Donald Trump told them to.”
Texas Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia added: “He is going to use his racist language, he’s going to spew hate, outrage, division — while providing no real plan to fix our broken immigration system.”
Trump has always enjoyed a polling advantage among those who see illegal immigration as a top concern.
When he took office, Biden immediately suspended or undid a number of Trump policies designed to slow immigration. One of those moves was to end the construction of a border wall that Trump had financed by raiding the Defense Department budget, despite repeated promises that he would force Mexico to pay for its construction.
Biden’s reforms, combined with the end of the COVID pandemic, led to a surge of migrant crossings in the past year, which has led to a worsening of the president’s approval ratings in polls.
Trump, as he did in 2016, has exploited Americans’ fear of crime by claiming — falsely — that illegal immigrants are responsible for a disproportionate number of violent crimes. Of late, he has used the murder of Laken Riley, a University of Georgia nursing student, in his campaign speeches.
In fact, reports and studies show that immigrants commit far fewer murdersthan native-born American citizens, and even unauthorized immigrants commit murders at a lower rate than those born in this country.
Trump is on the verge of clinching his third straight Republican presidential nomination in the next few weeks, despite facing 91 felony charges — 17 of them in two indictments based on his Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt. The federal case is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court, which is set to test Trump’s claim that he is immune from prosecution for everything he did as president. A separate Georgia case based on his efforts to overturn his election loss in that state could go to trial later this year.
A second federal prosecution is based on his refusal to turn over secret documents he took with him to his South Florida country club after he left the Oval Office. And a New York state indictment accuses him of falsifying business records to hide a $130,000 hush money payment to a porn star in the days ahead of the 2016 election. That trial is scheduled to begin in late March.
