Biden and Trump head to Texas as immigration debate heats up

US President Joe Biden and his rival Donald Trump are set to visit the US-Mexico border on Thursday, as illegal immigration becomes an increasingly potent political issue in the race for the White House.

Republicans have blamed lax immigration rules under Biden for a surge in illegal border crossings from Mexico, while the president has lashed out at congressional Republicans for blocking an immigration deal under pressure from Trump.

“Months ago, I instructed my team to begin working with bipartisan lawmakers to fix our immigration system,” Biden said in a post on X. “They did a hell of a job, and together, we put forward some of the most fair reforms ever.”

“Speaker [Mike] Johnson, it’s time to call a vote and send this bill to my desk,” he added, referring to the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Biden will travel on Thursday to Brownsville, Texas, on the border with Mexico, and meet US Border Patrol agents, law enforcement and local leaders.

The surge of migrants crossing the US-Mexico border since Biden entered the White House in 2021 has become a problem for the president as he gears up for an expected gruelling re-election contest against Trump, who is making his own trip this week to Eagle Pass, another border town in Texas.

In the 12 months to the end of September, US officials reported a record 2.5mn “encounters” at the Mexican border — up from 2.4mn the previous year and 1.7mn in 2021. Encounters include migrants who seek asylum at a port of entry and those detained after an unauthorised border crossing.

The rise has stretched infrastructure even in some cities and states far from the southern border and increased public concern, with a poll from Monmouth University published on Monday showing that 61 per cent of Americans — and 91 per cent of Republicans — considered illegal immigration to be a “very serious” problem.

Most Americans support building a wall on the US-Mexico border for the first time since Monmouth first began asking the question in 2015.

“Illegal immigration has taken centre stage as a defining issue this presidential election year,” said Patrick Murray, director of the non-partisan Monmouth University Polling Institute. He cited separate Monmouth polling showing immigration was Biden’s “weakest policy area”, even among Democratic voters.

A recent survey from Marist, another pollster, found independent voters were more than twice as likely to choose Republicans rather than Democrats when it comes to handling the issue of immigration.

Biden and his Democratic allies have increasingly sharpened their rhetoric on immigration in recent weeks, despite concerns from some progressives in his party about the shift in tone.

New York Democrat Tom Suozzi won a special election earlier this month for a US House seat in part by campaigning for tighter controls at the southern border.

In a memo to fellow Democrats after Suozzi’s victory, US Senator Chris Murphy urged his colleagues to take a tougher stance on immigration and call out Republicans for rejecting the bipartisan border deal.

“We risk losing the 2024 election if we do not seize this opportunity to go on offence on the issue of the border and turn the tables on Republicans on a key fall voting issue,” Murphy wrote.

Biden is reportedly separately considering issuing an executive order to restrict undocumented migrants’ ability to claim asylum once they reach the US.

The executive order could come before next week’s State of the Union on March 7, which Biden’s allies consider a chance for him to reset a re-election campaign stymied by low approval ratings and public concern about the 81-year-old president’s age.

Biden’s Republican opponents say the Democratic president is doing too little too late.

“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,” said Karoline Leavitt, press secretary for Trump’s presidential campaign.

In a social media post on Monday, Trump blamed Biden for a border “invasion” that was “destroying our country and killing our citizens”, citing the death last week of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old student at the University of Georgia allegedly killed by a citizen of Venezuela who entered the US illegally.

“When I am your president, we will immediately seal the border, stop the invasion, and on day one, we will begin the largest deportation operation of illegal criminals in American history!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Georgia’s Republican governor Brian Kemp also linked Riley’s death to the border, telling a news conference: “Because of the White House’s failures, every state is now a border state . . . Laken Riley’s murder is just proof of that.”