SAN ANTONIO — Two presidential frontrunners took to different South Texas stages to engage in the evolving conversation on immigration when they visited the U.S.-Mexico border Thursday.
President Joe Biden arrived in Brownsville in the afternoon, marking his second trip to the border region as president. Biden last visited the border in January 2023, when he went to El Paso. While there he discussed the needs of local law enforcement working overtime hours to contend with a rise in migrant encounters at the border, and revealed a new $20 billion bipartisan border package that would provide more agents and speed up the immigration process for asylum-seekers.
According to the White House press secretary, Biden met with border agents to discuss their need for devices to track drugs being smuggled into the U.S. as well as more agents to patrol the region.
His newly revealed legislation would provide funding for those critical resources while also funding an additional 100 immigration judges and giving the president "emergency authority to temporarily shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed."
This is the same border deal congressional Republicans turned down earlier this month.
While Biden was in Brownsville, former president and GOP frontrunner Donald Trump visited Eagle Pass for his own border trip, and equated the immigration issue to a "war."
He repeated familiar refrains from the 2020 election campaign by attacking Joe Biden while praising the efforts taken by Gov. Greg Abbott to secure the border and making hyperbolic, often-inaccurate statements about the correlations between migrant arrivals and U.S. crime.
Trump has laid out updated immigration proposals that would mark a dramatic escalation of the approach he used in office and that drew alarms from civil rights activists and numerous court challenges.
Some of those include reviving and expanding his controversial travel ban, imposing "ideological screening” for migrants, terminating all work permits and cutting off funding for shelter and transportation for people who are in the country illegally.