Biden, Trump Set for Rival US-Mexico Border Visits

AFP/APP
Washington: US President Joe Biden and Donald Trump will pay duelling visits to the US-Mexico border Thursday in a bid to win over voters on one of the most divisive issues of November’s presidential election.
The showdown in Texas comes at a time when record numbers of migrant crossings into the United States are posing a major threat to Biden’s chances of preventing a Trump comeback.
Democrat Biden will meet border patrol and other law enforcement agents in Brownsville, Texas, while Republican Trump heads to Eagle Pass, about 300 miles (480 kilometres) to the west.
Biden has sought to defuse the politically toxic border issue by blaming Republicans in Congress for failing to back an immigration reform package negotiated over months by both parties.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday that Biden would deliver remarks in Brownsville to highlight “what he has done to continue moving forward in dealing with this issue and how Republicans have gotten in the way.”
The bipartisan bill, she said on CNN, had even won the support of typically conservative groups such as the Border Patrol Union and the US Chamber of Commerce.
“In this political time, it is unreal, unheard of, to see that type of support for a bipartisan bill.”
For Trump, a hardline anti-immigration stance has been central to his political identity for years, and he has pledged the biggest ever US deportation programme if he returns to the White House.
“No country can sustain what is happening to our country,” the former president told the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington earlier this month.
Trump claimed migrants were “killing our people; they’re killing our country,” echoing the increasingly far-right rhetoric that saw him describe migrants last year as “poisoning the blood” of the United States.