By Seung Min Kim, Colleen Long, Zeke Miller and Jill Colvin | Associated Press
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump will make dueling trips to the Mexican border in Texas on Thursday after congressional talks on a deal to rein in illegal migration collapsed, according to people familiar with the plans.
The visits underscore immigration’s central importance in the 2024 presidential race and how much both Biden and Trump are seeking to use the nation’s broken system to their political advantage.
Biden will travel to Brownsville, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley, an area that often sees large numbers of border crossings, said three people who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss the president’s plans before they had been announced.
He will meet border agents and discuss the need for bipartisan legislation, the people said. It would be his second visit to the border as president. He traveled to El Paso in January last year.
Trump, for his part, will head to Eagle Pass, Texas, about 325 miles or 520 kilometers away from Brownsville, another hotspot in the state-federal clash over border security, according to three other people who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss the plans.
The number of people who are illegally crossing the U.S. border has been rising for complicated reasons that include climate change, war and unrest in other nations, the economy, and cartels that see migration as a cash cow.
The administration has been pairing crackdowns at the border with increasing legal pathways for migrants designed to steer people into arriving by plane with sponsors, not illegally on foot to the border. But U.S. policy right now allows for migrants to claim asylum regardless of how they arrive. And the numbers of migrants flowing to the U.S-Mexico border have far outpaced the capacity of an immigration system that has not been substantially updated in decades. Arrests…
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