By Colleen Long, EL PASO Texas
President Joe Biden walked a
muddy stretch of the U.S.-Mexico
border and inspected a busy port of entry Sunday on his first trip to
the region after two years in office, a visit shadowed by the fraught
politics of immigration as Republicans blame him for record
numbers of migrants crossing into the country.
At his first stop, the
president observed as border officers in El Paso demonstrated
how they search vehicles for drugs,
money and other contraband. Next, he traveled to a dusty street with abandoned
buildings and walked along a metal border fence that separated the U.S. city
from Ciudad Juarez.
His last stop was the El Paso
County Migrant Services Center — but there were no migrants in sight. As he
learned about the services offered there, he asked an aid worker, “If I could
wave the wand, what should I do?” The answer was not audible.
Biden’s nearly four-hour visit
to El Paso was highly controlled. He encountered no migrants except when his
motorcade drove alongside the border and about a dozen were visible on the
Ciudad Juárez side. His visit did not include time at a Border Patrol station,
where migrants who cross illegally are arrested and held before their release.
He delivered no public remarks.
The visit seemed designed to
showcase a smooth operation to process legal migrants, weed out smuggled
contraband and humanely treat those who have entered illegally, creating a
counter-narrative to Republicans’ claims of a crisis situation equivalent to an
open border.
But his visit was likely do
little to quell critics from both sides, including immigrant advocates who
accuse him of establishing cruel policies not unlike those of his hard-line
predecessor, Donald Trump.
In a sign of the deep tensions
over immigration, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, handed Biden a letter
as soon as he touched down in the state that said the “chaos” at the border was
a “direct result” of the president’s failure to enforce federal laws. Biden
later took the letter out of his jacket pocket during his tour, telling
reporters, “I haven’t read it yet.” |
| "I’m in Mexico to meet with President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of Mexico and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada at the North American Leaders’ Summit." - Biden |
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy
dismissed Biden’s visit as a “photo op,” saying on Twitter that the Republican
majority would hold the administration “accountable for creating the most
dangerous border crisis in American history.”
El Paso County Judge Ricardo
Samaniego welcomed Biden’s visit, but said a current lull in arrivals prevented
the president from seeing how large the group of newcomers has been.
“He didn’t get to see the real
difficulties,” said Samaniego, who was in the local delegation that greeted
Biden. “It was good that he was here. It’s a first step. But we still need to
do more and have more time with him.”
Elsewhere in El Paso where
Biden did not visit, hundreds of migrants were gathered Sunday outside the
Sacred Heart Catholic Church, where they have been sleeping outdoors and
receiving three meals a day from faith groups and other humanitarian
organizations.
The migrants included several
pregnant women, including Karla Sainz, 26, eight months along. She was
traveling in a small group that included her 2-year-old son, Joshua. Sainz left
her three other children back home in Venezuela with her mother.
“I would ask President Biden
to help me with a permission or something so we can work and continue,” she
said.
Juan Tovar, 32, one of several
people in her group, suggested he also had political reasons for leaving his
home country. |
| A migrant child holds her dog while camping outside the Sacred Heart Church in downtown El Paso, Texas, Sunday, Jan. 8, 2023. President Joe Biden arrived in Texas on Sunday for his first trip to the U.S.-Mexico border since taking office, stopping in El Paso |
“Socialism is the worst,” he
said. “In Venezuela, they kill us, they torture us, we can’t talk bad about the
government. We are worse off than in Cuba.”
Noengris Garcia, also eight
months pregnant, was traveling with her husband, teen son and the small family
dog from the tiny state of Portuguesa, Venezuela, where she operated a food
stall.
“We don’t want to be given
money or a house,” said Garcia, 39. “We just want to work.”
Asked what he’s learned by
seeing the border firsthand and speaking with the officers who work along it,
Biden said: “They need a lot of resources. We’re going to get it for them.”
El Paso is currently the biggest
corridor for illegal crossings, in large part due to Nicaraguans fleeing
repression, crime and poverty in their country. They are among migrants from
four countries who are now subject to quick expulsion under new
rules enacted by the Biden administration in the past week that drew
strong criticism from immigration advocates.
Biden’s recent policy announcements
on border security and his visit to the border were aimed in part at blunting
the impact of upcoming investigations into immigration promised by House
Republicans. But any enduring solution will require action by the sharply
divided Congress, where multiple efforts to enact sweeping changes have failed
in recent years.
From Texas, Biden traveled
south to Mexico City, where he
and the leaders of Mexico and Canada will gather on Monday and Tuesday
for a North American leaders summit. Immigration is among the items on the
agenda. Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador met Biden at the airport
Sunday night and joined him in the presidential limousine for the ride to
Biden’s hotel.
The numbers of migrants
crossing the U.S.-Mexico border has risen dramatically during Biden’s first two
years in office. There were more than 2.38 million stops during the year that
ended Sept. 30, the first time the number topped 2 million. The administration
has struggled to clamp down on crossings, reluctant to take measures that would
resemble those of Trump’s administration.
The policy changes announced
this past week are Biden’s biggest move yet to contain illegal border crossings
and will turn away tens of thousands of migrants arriving at the border. At the
same time, 30,000 migrants per month from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Venezuela
will get the chance to come to the U.S. legally as long as they travel by
plane, get a sponsor and pass background checks.
The U.S. will also turn away
migrants who do not seek asylum first in a country they traveled through en
route to the U.S. Migrants are being asked to complete a form on a phone app so
that they they can go to a port of entry at a pre-scheduled date and time.
Homeland Security Secretary
Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters aboard Air Force One that the administration
is trying to “incentivize a safe and orderly way and cut out the smuggling
organizations,” saying the policies are “not a ban at all” but an attempt to
protect migrants from the trauma that smuggling can create.
The changes were welcomed by
some, particularly leaders in cities where migrants have been massing. But
Biden was excoriated by immigrant advocate groups, which accused him of taking measures
modeled after those of the former president. Administration officials disputed
that characterization.
For all of his international
travel over his 50 years in public service, Biden has not spent much time at
the U.S.-Mexico border.
The only visit that the White
House could point to was Biden’s drive by the border while he was campaigning
for president in 2008. He sent Vice
President Kamala Harris to El Paso in 2021, but she was criticized for
largely bypassing the action, because El Paso wasn’t the center of crossings
that it is now.
Trump, who made hardening
immigration a signature issue, traveled to the border several times. - AP
