President Biden visited the border in Texas on Thursday to blame Donald Trump for gridlock on immigration and plead with Congress to forgo politics and pass legislation that he said would control the masses of people surging into the U.S.
Standing before a line of Border Patrol agents, Mr. Biden attempted to reframe one of his biggest political liabilities as an opportunity for statesmanship. He accused his predecessor and opposition party front-runner of practicing “rank partisan politics” in opposing a bill.
He said the legislation would clear Congress if Mr. Trump backs it.
“Here’s what I would say to Mr. Trump: Instead of playing politics with this issue, join me — or I’ll join you — in telling the Congress to pass this bipartisan bill,” he said. “It’s the toughest, most efficient, most effective border security bill this country’s ever seen.”
Several hundred miles up the Rio Grande, Mr. Trump was making his own border visit. He leaned into the immigration issue by labeling the mass incursion of people the “Joe Biden invasion.” He said he solved the border issue when he was in the Oval Office and could do it again.
“Three years ago, we had the most secure border in history,” Mr. Trump said in Eagle Pass. “And people weren’t coming because they knew they weren’t going to get in.”
The dueling visits underscored the high stakes. Immigration ranks at the top of voters’ issues, according to Gallup polling data.
Mr. Biden, after studiously ignoring the border for most of the past three years, is engaging on familiar ground. He cast himself as the Washington deal-maker seeking bipartisanship.
“This bill was in the United States Senate, and it was on its way to being passed, and then it was derailed by rank partisan politics,” he said.
“Show a little spine,” he told Congress.
Mr. Trump focused heavily on the costs of the millions of illegal immigrants who have made it into the U.S. over the past three years. He said communities across the country are feeling the impact in the worst ways.
He said he had spoken with the parents of Laken Riley, a student killed on a Georgia college campus by someone authorities say is an illegal immigrant caught and released under Mr. Biden’s policies.
“Her parents can never be the same,” Mr. Trump said.
He said Mr. Biden is responsible for “the blood of countless innocent victims.”
Mr. Trump said the answers from his previous term — building a border wall, limiting asylum claims, and ousting illegal immigrants so they aren’t waiting in the U.S. for their immigration cases to be heard — worked before and could work again.
The numbers tell much of that story.
In December 2020, the last full month under Mr. Trump, Customs and Border Protection nabbed roughly 75,000 illegal immigrants at the southern border. Fewer than 1,000 were caught and released.
This December, under Mr. Biden, CBP tallied more than 300,000 illegal immigrants at the southern border. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas estimates that more than 85%, or more than 255,000, were caught and released.
Mr. Biden at first downplayed the numbers and forbade the use of the word “crisis.” He called the surge “seasonal” and predicted it would dissipate after a few months. When the numbers worsened, he tried to ignore them. He resisted a border visit until January 2023, nearly two years into office.
Now, the politics of the moment has forced his second visit.
He is reportedly pondering executive actions to revive some of the Trump policies he used to decry as cruel, and he has publicly reversed his position on detaining illegal immigrants and restricting asylum claims. He also has had to restart border wall construction to comply with a spending law Congress enacted during the Trump years.
Mr. Biden didn’t touch on those matters Thursday. Instead, he reached for a bipartisan deal he said he would sign.
The Senate deal would have funded more Border Patrol positions, more asylum officers, more immigration judges and more detention beds. Mr. Biden said it included the resources agents have demanded.
The legislation would have given the president new expulsion powers, curtailed some uses of “parole” and tightened the rules on asylum. It would have approved Mr. Biden’s use of catch-and-release as the standard practice for many illegal immigrants, with the hope that they could be sped to faster immigration court decisions.
Analysts debated how much of the legislation would derail the illegal immigrant flow, but Mr. Biden said he was convinced it would work by deporting illegal immigrants in a matter of months. He said that would undermine the incentive for migrants to pay thousands of dollars for the trip to the border.
“That would have a serious deterrent effect on those coming north,” he said.
The proposal was defeated in a bipartisan filibuster, with a handful of Democrats joining most Republicans. The Republican lawmakers said the deal was too weak on illegal immigration, and the Democratic opponents said it was too tough on those hoping to claim asylum.
In his remarks, Mr. Biden said the plan had been endorsed by the National Border Patrol Council, which represents agents and has backed Mr. Trump over the years.
NBPC President Brandon Judd, speaking alongside Mr. Trump, said agents are “pissed” at Mr. Biden’s handling of the issue.
“Attention President Biden: Keep our name out of your mouth today,” the NBPC said on social media.
Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump got drastically different looks at the border situation.
Brownsville is one of the calmest spots on the border. Agents regularly tally days with single-digit arrests of border jumpers.
Eagle Pass, meanwhile, is one of the epicenters of the chaos, with agents recording hundreds of illegal immigrants a day. It’s also where Texas is most strenuously battling the Biden administration, with miles of razor wire placed along the Rio Grande, a floating border wall in one stretch of the river and National Guard troops occupying a park that the Border Patrol had been using to facilitate catch-and-release.
Mr. Mayorkas told reporters that Mr. Biden was in Brownsville because it is a success story.
A year ago, roughly a third of the illegal immigrant traffic was coming through the Rio Grande Valley, where Brownsville is located. Mr. Mayorkas said the numbers have been “reduced significantly” because of Biden administration changes.
“One of the benefits of being in Brownsville is to see what can be accomplished productively in the service of border security when local officials work with federal officials to address a shared challenge,” Mr. Mayorkas said.