President Joe Biden and Donald Trump are both heading to the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas
President Joe Biden and his likely Republican challenger Donald Trump both head to the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas on Thursday in a sign of how central immigration has become to the 2024 election and how much both candidates want to use it to their advantage.
Each has chosen an optimal location from which to underscore his respective points.
Biden, who wants to spotlight how Republicans tanked a bipartisan border security deal on Trump’s orders, will go to the Rio Grande Valley city of Brownsville. For nine years, this was the busiest corridor for illegal crossings, but illegal crossings there have dropped sharply in recent months.
Trump, for his part, wants to continue his attacks on Biden and keep up his dialed-up rhetoric after saying migrants were poisoning the blood of Americans. He will do so from Eagle Pass, roughly 325 miles northwest of Brownsville, in the corridor that’s currently seeing the largest number of crossings. Trump is expected to speak from a state park that has become a Republican symbol of defiance against the federal government’s immigration enforcement practices.
In other words, the split screen moment couldn’t possibly be more split, and each candidate is asking voters to side with his approach to immigration.
Among voters, worries about the nation’s broken immigration system are rising on both sides of the political divide, which could be especially problematic for Biden.
According to an AP-NORC poll in January, the share of voters concerned about immigration rose to 35% from 27% last year. Fifty-five percent of Republicans say the government needs to focus on immigration in 2024, while 22% of Democrats listed immigration as a priority. That’s up from 45% and 14%, respectively, from December 2022.
The number of people who are illegally crossing the U.S. border has been rising for years for complicated reasons that include climate change, war and unrest in other nations, the economy, and cartels that see migration as a cash cow.
