Defining day for immigration? Border cities await real answers in rare visits by Biden, Trump
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BROWNSVILLE, Texas – As President Joe Biden arrives here sometime Thursday, this city in the southernmost crook of the Rio Grande will be kicking off Charro Days.
People will pour into the streets as they have since 1938 to celebrate all things Mexican in Brownsville, with mariachi bands, a bullfight and a parade that includes floats from Matamoros, Mexico, its sister city across the bridge.
Around the same time, the president will meet with Border Patrol and local law enforcement officials, continuing his pivot toward tough border enforcement as immigration becomes one of his biggest re-election liabilities.
And the same afternoon, ex-President Donald Trump will arrive upstream in Eagle Pass, where state-run border enforcement efforts have turned the city park into a militarized zone lined with steel fencing and razor wire.
The backdrops for these two visits help define two visions of the American immigration system.
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In Eagle Pass, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and his border initiative known as Operation Lone Star have framed the border as a dangerous beachhead in an immigration fight that now spills into cities across the country.
Almost everyone has grown accustomed to daily flows of migrants in Brownsville, a city where the international bridge drops into town right between the community college campus and the Ross Dress for Less. Immigration officials here process asylum-seekers daily while thousands more wait their turn in camps across the river – outside the United States.
Which version of the border voters accept as reality – or which vision they choose – is now likely to define the presidential election. For the first time since last decade, Americans now believe immigration to be the most important issue facing the United States, a Gallup poll released this week revealed.
For the people at the border, meanwhile, any campaign stop will simply showcase an immigration system that continues to disrupt their communities – and a political one that has yet to deliver them a solution.
“Do either of these people – President Biden or Trump – have a positive vision of what the border and migration at the border should look like?” said Bob Libal, an Austin-based consultant for Human Rights Watch, who travels to the border often. “Is there a vision?”
In Brownsville, Charlene D’Cruz, an immigration attorney who works with asylum-seekers, was baffled by the idea of a Biden visit. In her view, border policies have only failed to deliver relief to migrants who are preyed upon by cartels while they wait in Matamoros, or take deadly risks to cross the border instead of waiting at the ports.
“What exactly is he trying to do?” she said. “Is he trying to show, ‘Hey, it’s all orderly’? Those optics are there: It is orderly. But people are dying. Things haven’t changed. How is Biden’s trip going to fix that?”
Biden's border visit in Brownsville, Texas
At Fina’s Coffee Shop in central Brownsville, Veronica Benavides is more concerned with the price of eggs. Diners at the breakfast-all-day eatery she co-owns consume them at a clip of about 45 dozen a day.
The rising cost of rents – and eggs – and stagnant incomes rank higher for her than immigration. She said she recognizes the significance of Biden coming to Brownsville, but immigration is not a top issue for her or her business, despite the flow of asylum-seekers released into her community.
“They don’t stay here,” Benavides said. “They want to go Houston, to San Antonio. They want to go to bigger cities.”
Brownsville made headlines several years ago, when then-President Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols policy blocked asylum-seekers from reaching the U.S. and led to makeshift camps in Matamoros. Today, the sprawling camps are gone, replaced by smaller clusters of tents housing Haitians, Venezuelans, Ukrainians and Africans waiting for their chance to apply for asylum in the U.S.
Today, recently-released migrants are sometimes seen trudging along the highway in Brownsville or clustered outside the local mall. Recently, Frank Garza, a 49-year-old business owner, encountered a group of Ukrainians having dinner at Pizza Hut. He said the sheer number of people staggering around town last year spooked his wife. He thinks the system shouldn’t just release so many people so easily.
Garza said he hopes Biden’s visit confirms to the world that Brownsville is dealing with a real migrant issue.
“I hope everybody sees it is real,” he said. “It’s very real here.”
D’Cruz, the immigration attorney, sees those migrants as the ones at risk. Rather than have Biden meet with border agents, she’d prefer the president address the rows of razor wire lining the river banks – noting that the governor’s border enforcement efforts have left a mark on Brownsville, too.
“How much control does Biden really have?” she asked. “The federal government is losing control of its own border when you have Texas trying to enforce it.”
Trump's visit to Eagle Pass, Texas
Trump is expected to emerge on Thursday in Eagle Pass’s Shelby Park, the riverfront park that was once the scene of weekend family picnics. Since 2022, though, it has been taken over by Operation Lone Star, Abbott’s billion-dollar initiative to combat undocumented border crossers. Military humvees and Texas National Guard troops guard the entrance to the park, which is used as a staging area for patrols.
Richard Flores, 58, a fifth-generation rancher in Eagle Pass, said he welcomes Trump’s visit. Flores has seen firsthand how smugglers and migrants have trampled through his property, at times cutting through his fences and allowing cattle to escape.
Though the military takeover of Shelby Park seemed a bit much at first, he said he welcomes someone who will come and offer solutions, he said.
“There are a lot of people excited about it, and there are some people against it,” Flores said of Trump’s visit. “If I were running for president, I would come here, too.”
The Biden campaign and surrogates called Trump’s visit to the border “a political stunt,” blaming the former president’s opposition to a bipartisan border bill – which denied Biden a legislative win – for blocking long-awaited action to address the border crisis. “Trump's need to boost his own fragile political ego has gotten us here with another manufactured logjam,” Illinois Gov. J.D. Pritzker, who serves on the Biden campaign’s advisory board, told reporters.
What Biden is expected to reveal in Brownsville is murkier. He’s scheduled to meet with U.S. Border Patrol officials and local law enforcement leaders. The White House has declined to say whether Biden will meet with migrants or announce any new policies.
Victor Maldonado, executive director of the Ozanam Center, the city’s largest homeless and migrant shelter, said he was surprised he wasn’t invited to any of Biden’s events. “We see the reality of what happens to these people and why they’re here,” Maldonado said. “We’re the front lines.”
Whatever both presidential contenders say or don’t say, Americans are already making up their minds about what they’ve heard. The Gallup poll showed 28% of respondents pointing to immigration as the most pressing problem in the country, up from 20% last month. The last time immigration topped a Gallup poll was in 2019, when surges of Central American migrants appeared at the U.S-Mexico border.
Biden is expected to bring up the recent bipartisan immigration bill, which stalled in the House after losing Republican support, and show he’s willing to take executive actions to bolster enforcement at the border. He’ll have a lot of convincing to do. According to a Pew Research Center survey released earlier this month, 80% of Americans believe the government is doing a bad job dealing with the large number of migrants at the border, up from 65% in 2019.
Though Republican and Democratic respondents differed in opinions on what was causing the surges or how to fix them, they agreed on one point: the Biden administration was handling it poorly, said Carroll Doherty, Pew’s director of political research.
“Any time you see 80% of Americans saying the government’s not doing well on an issue, it’s quite damning,” Doherty said.
Those conclusions highlight a reality that has daunted many presidential administrations, as the lure of American opportunity draws waves of migrants at a scale that overwhelms the limited legal pathways to allow them in.
Instead, images of floods of migrants stoke real worries about the federal government’s ability to vet so many people so quickly. And the cities where they arrive struggle to take them in.
So any speech at the border will miss the point if it’s only about the border, said Laura Collins, who directs the Bush Institute-Southern Methodist University Economic Growth Initiative in Dallas.
“The border is more than a national security problem or a migration problem,” Collins said.
“I would like to see a vision for how a functioning immigration system benefits America,” she said. “Only talking about the border neglects half the conversation that needs to happen in order to make the border actually functional.”
A border city remains
Across Brownsville, the day before the president’s arrival, residents preened plazas and streets.
Washington Plaza downtown was transformed into a fairground – not for a speech by Biden, but for the start of Charro Days, the three-day event named for the Mexican cowboys of the region’s history.
Crews set up food and beer tents and a stage. Nearby, color-strewn parade floats were parked in front lawns, ready to roll through town.
In earlier years, Charro Days’ international parade actually crossed the bridge between Matamoros and Brownsville. Today the city must settle for bringing floats and participants over from the other side.
Judge Eddie Treviño, Cameron County’s top executive, said the event sparks a special buzz in Brownsville. He began hearing rumors of Biden’s visit over the weekend then received a call from the White House on Monday, inviting him to attend.
Treviño said he realizes he won’t have a lot of face time with the president, but in the short time he does, he plans on telling him no amount of enforcement will stop the region’s waves of migrants until the system as a whole improves. He sees the recent bilateral immigration bill as a step in the right direction.
“The immigration system in our country hasn’t been updated in over 40 years. We’ve known these problems were coming,” he said. “Republican and Democratic administrations keep kicking the can down the road. That’s just not how it works.”
Lauren Villagran and Joey Garrison of USA TODAY contributed.