EL PASO — President Joe Biden’s visit Sunday to the Texas-Mexico border included a handshake with Gov. Greg Abbott (along with a note that was not a fan letter); a stop at the Bridge of the Americas, a busy port of entry; and a surprise walk with Border Patrol agents along the wall separating El Paso from Ciudad Juárez.
The president’s four-hour visit — a layover on his way to a summit in Mexico City — spotlighted a region that has been rocked by a massive influx of migrants and is ground zero for the debate over Title 42, a public health rule that has allowed border agents to expel millions of migrants quickly.
Biden’s visit coincided with criticism from different sides of the immigration debate, including GOP leaders who blast him for what they call an “open border” policy, and from immigrant advocates who have denounced new border enforcement measures announced last week.
Biden was greeted by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott at El Paso International Airport. The two men shook hands. Then Abbott handed the president a letter that outlined laws the governor said would make a great difference, if enforced, in addressing the “chaos” at the border.
“This chaos is the direct result of your failure to enforce the immigration laws that Congress enacted,” Abbott wrote. “Your open-border policies have emboldened the cartels, who grow wealthy by trafficking deadly fentanyl and even human beings. Texans are paying an especially high price for your failure.”
Asked by reporters about Abbott’s letter, Biden said: “I haven’t read it yet.” Asked what he’s learned on the border, he said, “They need a lot of resources. We’re going to get it for them.”
Known as the “Ellis Island of the Southwest,” El Paso is a heavily Democratic city that ordinarily would welcome the president with open arms. But Sunday, Biden was received with a dose of skepticism and mixed feelings.
“I’m not going to be nice, and I won’t be rude, either,” El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego said before meeting the president. “I’m going to tell him the trip was way overdue. But I don’t like the fact that it’s a pit stop. I mean, you’re not spending a whole day at the epicenter of the humanitarian crisis?”
Law enforcement focus
The story of the downtrodden crossing into the U.S. for greater opportunity is one that resonates daily, said Samaniego, who was one of the local leaders accompanying Biden during his visit to the border — his first since becoming president in 2021.
Samaniego said he also doesn’t like that Biden’s “whole focus ... is on law enforcement, expedited removal and humanitarian parole to a few. We’re moving away from our own story as a nation of immigrants.”
“I mean, why are so many [people] crossing? They’re crossing because they are desperate, which is not unlike so many Mexicans over generations and so many Irish at the turn of the century,” he said, alluding to Biden’s ancestral roots in Ireland.
Biden was joined by Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas; Reps. Veronica Escobar, Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, all Democrats; El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser; Bishop Mark Seitz of the Catholic Diocese of El Paso; and Samaniego.
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 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.
Mayorkas told reporters the new border enforcement measures aim to “broadly incentivize [a] safe and orderly way [for migration], and cut out the smuggling organizations.” The government wants “to incentivize [migrants] to come to the ports of entry instead of in between the points of entry.”
Mayorkas responded to criticism that the border enforcement measures are akin to a transit ban. “It is not a ban at all,” he told reporters. “It is markedly different than what the Trump administration proposed.”
Migration and fentanyl
Biden visited the Bridge of the Americas Port of Entry with U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers, members of Congress and local officials and law enforcement.
He met with border officials to discuss migration, as well as the increased trafficking of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids, which are driving skyrocketing numbers of overdoses in the U.S. Officers showed the president the kinds of items they confiscate, including drugs and food products.
Biden’s 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 president’s visit was highly controlled. He encountered no migrants except when his motorcade drove alongside the border and about a dozen lined up 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.
“What’s incredible and terribly sad is that the Biden administration has found the perfect immigration tool. No one gets any rights,” said Ruben Garcia, director of the Annunciation House aid group in El Paso.
“No one gets to call any attorney to plead their case,” he said. “They’re all automatically expelled, all of these people, just like that. That’s why Title 42 is former President Trump’s wall. And now Biden is in office and he’s doing the same thing, washing his hands the same way.”
‘Rearranging chairs on the deck’
Ahead of the president’s visit, Abbott scoffed at Biden’s outreach. “All he’s going to do down there is rearrange the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. He’s not going to achieve any solutions that will make the border safer, more secure and stop illegal immigration,” he told Fox News.
David Stout, El Paso County commissioner and chairman of the Texas Border Coalition, met with Biden and criticized Abbott’s efforts in what he said was further militarizing the border.
“What we really need to be doing is asking the state government for… resources to help us with humanitarian assistance, and [Abbott] hasn’t done any of that,” Stout said. “Again, as usual, [Abbott is] playing political games at the expense of our community.”
Biden’s announcement on border security and his visit to the border are aimed in part at quelling the political noise and 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.
Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas offered faint praise for Biden’s decision to visit the border, and even that was notable in the current political climate.
“He must take the time to learn from some of the experts I rely on the most, including local officials and law enforcement, landowners, nonprofits, U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s officers and agents, and folks who make their livelihoods in border communities on the front lines of his crisis,” Cornyn said.
Mexico summit
From El Paso, Biden will continue 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.
The challenge facing the U.S. on its southern border “is something that is not unique to the United States. It’s gripping the hemisphere. And a regional challenge requires a regional solution,” Mayorkas told ABC’s This Week before joining Biden on the trip.
The number 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 hard-line measures that would resemble those of the administration of former President Donald Trump.
‘Poisonous anti-immigrant policies’
The latest measures come as immigrant advocates call for the return of asylum processing at the border, under U.S. and international law, for those who face certain types of persecution.
Biden recognized “that seeking asylum is a legal right and spoke sympathetically about people fleeing persecution,” Jonathan Blazer, the ACLU director of border strategies, said last week. “But the plan he announced further ties his administration to the poisonous anti-immigrant policies of the Trump era instead of restoring fair access to asylum protections.”
Blazer added, “Let’s be clear: Nothing requires the administration to expand Title 42 while it claims to be preparing for its ending. There is simply no reason why the benefits of a new parole program for Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians must be conditioned on the expansion of dangerous expulsions.”
Title 42 has allowed U.S. border agents to expel migrants more than 2 million times without giving them a chance to apply for asylum under the justification that it was for pandemic safety. The lifting of Title 42 is under litigation before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Stout, the El Paso County commissioner, said he’s concerned about a video circulating online showing Border Patrol agents taking into custody migrants sleeping in the streets outside a bus station and Sacred Heart Catholic Church.
Another video, taken outside a homeless shelter, shows a Border Patrol agent trying to take into custody a suspected migrant. In the video, the agent appears to push the migrant near the building, and then grabs the migrant and slams him to the ground.
“It’s very unnerving, a terrible video,” said Stout, calling on the Biden administration to investigate the incident. “These are people, real human beings, and they’re on our streets. We should never lose our compassion, or just sweep them under the rug.”
In response, a CBP spokesman said: “Although at the moment we do not have all the details of what occurred during this incident, CBP takes all allegations of misconduct seriously, investigates thoroughly, and holds employees accountable when policies are violated. The Office of Professional Responsibility is reviewing the incident.”
For all of Biden’s international travel over his 50 years in public service, he has not spent much time at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The only visit 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.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
CORRECTION, 9:55 a.m., Jan. 9, 2023: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said Joe Biden became president in 2020. He was elected in 2020 and became president in 2021.
