EL PASO, Texas (AP) – 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 to it was overshadowed by tough immigration politics as Republicans blamed it for record numbers of migrants crossing into the country.
In his first stop, the president watched as border officials 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 the metal border fence that separated the US 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 a support worker, “If I could wave the stick, what would 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 along 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 detained before being released. He made no public comments.
The visit appeared to be designed to showcase a smooth operation to process legal immigrants, weed out smuggled contraband and humanely treat those who have entered illegally, creating a counter-narrative to Republican claims of a situation of crisis equivalent to an open border.
But his visit apparently did little to silence critics from both sides, including immigrant advocates who accuse him of instituting brutal policies not unlike those of his hard-line predecessor, Donald Trump.
As a sign of the deep tensions surrounding immigration, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, gave a letter to Biden as soon as he finished in the state saying that the “chaos” on the border was a “direct result” of the president’s opinion. failure to enforce federal laws. Biden later pulled the letter out of his jacket pocket during his trip, telling reporters, “I haven’t read it yet.”
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy dismissed Biden’s visit as a “photo op,” saying on Twitter that the majority of Republicans 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 the current silence is preventing 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 is 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 gathered on Sunday outside the Sacred Heart Catholic Church, where they have been sleeping in the open 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 later. She was traveling in a small group which included her 2-year-old son, Joshua. Sainz left her other three children back home in Venezuela with her mother.
“I will ask President Biden to help me with a permit or something so that I can work and continue,” he said.
Juan Tovar, 32, one of several people in his group, suggested that he also had political reasons for leaving his homeland.
“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, who is also eight months pregnant, was traveling with her husband, teenage son and the small family dog from the small Portuguese state of Venezuela, where she operated a food stall.
“We don’t want to get money or a house,” said Garcia, 39. “We want to work.”
When asked what he has learned from seeing the border firsthand and talking to the officials 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 largest corridor for illegal crossings, mainly because Nicaraguans are fleeing oppression, crime and poverty in their country. They are among migrants from four countries now subject to expedited deportation under new rules enacted by the Biden administration in the past week that have drawn 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 immigration investigations promised by House Republicans. But any lasting solution will require action from a sharply divided Congress, where multiple attempts 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 summit of North American leaders. Immigration is among the items on the agenda. Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador met Biden at the airport on Sunday night and joined him in the presidential limousine for the trip to the Biden hotel.
The number of migrants crossing the US-Mexico border has increased dramatically during Biden’s first two years in office. There were more than 2.38 million stops during the year ending September 30, the first time the number has reached 2 million. The administration has struggled to address crossings, reluctant to take measures that would resemble those of the Trump administration.
The policy changes announced last 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 a month from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Venezuela will have the opportunity to come to the US legally as long as they travel by plane, have a sponsor and pass background checks .
The US will also turn away migrants who are not seeking asylum first in a country they traveled through on the way to the US. Migrants are asked to fill out a form on a phone app so they can go to a port of entry at a pre-arranged 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, especially leaders in cities where migrants have been in large numbers. But Biden was excoriated by immigrant advocacy groups, who accused him of taking measures modeled after those of the former president. Administration officials disagreed with that characterization.
For all his international travel over his 50 years in public service, Biden has spent little time on the US-Mexico border.
The only visit the White House could point to was Biden’s drive near the border while he was campaigning for president in 2008. He sent Vice President Kamala Harris to El Paso in 2021, but was criticized for avoiding the action to a large extent, because El Paso was not the center of the crossings as it is now.
Trump, who made toughening immigration a signature issue, traveled to the border several times.
Associated Press writers Andres Leighton in El Paso, Texas; Anita Snow in Phoenix; Morgan Lee in Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Josh Boak in Washington contributed to this report.
