Updated at 5:20 p.m.

PHARR, Texas — With an unfinished wall for a backdrop, Donald Trump and Gov. Greg Abbott joined forces Wednesday to accuse President Joe Biden of unleashing chaos and unchecked migration at the border.

“It is time to make sure we seal this border and close it down,” Abbott declared, adopting some of the most Trumpian anti-immigrant rhetoric of his career in depicting migrants — without exception — as a security threat. “The people coming across the border are cartels and gangs and smugglers and human traffickers.”

Trump made the same point.

“What they’re doing is opening up their prisons, and prisoners — murderers, human traffickers, all of these people, drug dealers — are coming back into our country,” he said.

Exalting the merits of a wall whose construction has been frozen since he left office, Trump insisted that: “Biden is destroying our country. And it all started with a fake election.”

Immigration and border security have been Trump’s calling card issues for years, and Abbott’s rhetoric held echoes of his own false and inflammatory claims that Mexico purposely sends murderers and rapists into the United States.

Abbott faces primary challenges from the right and needs Trump’s base to win a third term next year.

For both, the rusting and incomplete section of Trump’s wall along the river in Pharr offered a potent venue.

“Look at this border. ... You see an unfinished border. This is Biden’s fault,” Abbott said at their rally-style joint appearance, huge American and Texas flags flapping on cranes.

Migration has hit levels not seen in two decades since Trump left office, partly because Biden is so much less hostile, violence continues in certain countries and because impoverished job seekers have been waiting until the U.S. economy recovered from pandemic lockdowns last year.

Trump managed to build 450 miles of wall, the last few dozen ordered in a hurry after his defeat. Biden halted construction and returned $2 billion that Trump had siphoned from the Pentagon budget.

Two weeks ago, Abbott announced that he’ll continue the project, starting with $250 million shifted from the state prison budget.

In March he announced that he would deploy more state police and National Guard to the border under Operation Lone Star. On May 31 he issued a disaster declaration in 34 counties, though he dropped the six most populous border counties on Monday because their leaders refused his demand to issue local disaster declarations.

In Hidalgo County, whose largest city is McAllen, county Judge Richard Cortez said last week that there’s not “sufficient evidence” to justify such a declaration.

That’s not how Trump and Abbott portrayed the situation as they joined a parade of Republicans who have visited the area, calling it the epicenter of a crisis.

Abbott said the deterioration of security since Biden took office has been so “amazing and disastrous,” the state has been forced to fill the vacuum.

Democrats and immigrant advocates denounced the joint appearance as a “stunt.”

“Trump … brought racism and hate to a fever pitch” and tried to militarize the border based on a “fake emergency,” said Texas Democratic Party chairman Gilberto Hinojosa of nearby Brownsville, a former Cameron County judge. And now Abbott is “busy promoting Trump’s pet project” and using border residents as “props for his political theater.”

“It’s unconscionable that the governor is wasting attention and resources to stir hate rather than focus on the urgent issues, such as fixing the state’s power grid,” said Juanita Valdez-Cox, executive director of La Unión del Pueblo Entero, referring to a days-long outage during a February freeze that cost an estimated 700 lives.

The group, which advocates for border communities, held a rally hours before Trump and Abbott arrived.

Biden has assigned Vice President Kamala Harris to focus on “root causes” of migration: poverty, corruption and violence, especially in Central America. Republicans have insisted on labeling her the “border czar.”

After resisting for months, Harris made her first visit to the border — in El Paso — on Friday, after Trump and Abbott announced their plans for Wednesday. Trump mocked her choice.

“We’re going to the real part of the border where there’s real problems, not a part where you look around and you don’t see anybody,” he said, alluding to the fact that the migrant surge is far more acute in Hidalgo and Starr counties, which are 800 miles closer to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador than El Paso.

Abbott mocked the focus on root causes, taking an enforcement-first, and maybe only, stance.

“They’re missing the point,” he asserted during a border security briefing at the Weslaco office of the Texas Department of Public Safety, flanked by Trump and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. “There’s one place to solve all the problems on the border, and that is on the border.”

Looking directly into the camera, Abbott — who may be angling for a 2024 presidential run — touted the steps he’s taken on border security, warning voters around the country that: “What comes across the border does not stay at the border. In fact it goes to your states.”

In May federal authorities counted about 180,000 “border encounters.” That’s a 20-year monthly high, though Customs and Border Protection has acknowledged the numbers are inflated.

At the outset of the pandemic in March 2020, Trump invoked a public health rule called Title 42 that allows immediate expulsion. The Border Patrol has used it some 845,000 times. Migrants are turned back so quickly that about 40% try again, far higher than the 7% recidivism rate in 2019.

“These people try over and over again,” said Terrence Garrett, a political scientist at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

Still, the spike has been a major GOP talking point, and it was the focus of the briefing Trump and Abbott received from two sheriffs and Texas DPS director Steven McCraw.

“You can’t have public safety unless you have border security,” McCraw said. “If you have a drug problem anywhere in the country, you have a border problem. It’s cocaine, methamphetamine, fentanyl and heroin.”

Sheriff Benny Martinez of rural Brooks County, population 7,200 and 70 miles away, said his officers are overwhelmed chasing migrants and are finding far more dead than before Trump left office.

Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn from Fort Worth, an eight-hour drive north, reiterated concerns he’d raised with Trump at the White House about drug smuggling and the impacts far from the border. Notably, he did not assert that the problem started or escalated since Trump left office.

The former president launched a rambling discourse that consumed nearly half the briefing, shifting from his affection for Abbott to border security to “Russia, Russia, Russia” and Hillary Clinton, then back to reminiscing about the border wall design process with a detour on the New York mayor’s race.

“We have a sick country in many ways. It’s sick in elections, and it’s sick at the border,” he said.

Trump insisted that fentanyl is “just pouring into our country” after being “almost a nonfactor” during his presidency — a strange claim, given that he routinely cited fentanyl smuggling to justify the border wall, as he did in a prime time Oval Office address on Jan. 8, 2019: “Our southern border is a pipeline for vast quantities of illegal drugs, including meth, heroin, cocaine and fentanyl.”

At another point he claimed that in Texas last fall, “We won in a landslide, it wasn’t even close,” though his 5.6-point victory was the third worst showing for a GOP nominee since Gerald Ford lost the White House in 1976, and much tighter than his own 9-point win in 2016.

He also gave a shoutout to “my doctor,” freshman Rep. Ronny Jackson of Amarillo, who as White House physician vouched for his mental acuity and now says Biden should take the same cognitive test to rule out dementia.

“I’d like to see Biden ace it. He wouldn’t ace it,” Trump said.

More than 30 Republican members of the U.S. House, including a dozen Texans, joined the border tour. Trump name-checked them all when they got to Pharr, where he also took swipes at absent adversaries such as Rep. Liz Cheney, whose support for his impeachment cost her a leadership post.

Pharr is across the river from Reynosa, site of a cartel bloodbath two weeks ago that left 19 people dead, all but four of them innocent bystanders. Hardly any of that violence has spilled into the United States.

Expulsions persist

Cameron County Judge Eddie Treviño Jr., who chairs the Texas Border Coalition, echoed widespread concern about Abbott’s $1 billion state investment in border security and effort to crowdsource wall construction with private donations.

Fencing makes sense at ports of entry, Treviño said, but not everywhere.

“Improved border security demands a comprehensive plan” that addresses root causes, he said, as the Biden administration has been doing in Central America.

After the border visit, Trump taped a Fox News town hall with Sean Hannity to air Wednesday night.

He has endorsed Abbott for a third term and lavished praise on him, even flattering Abbott with the fanciful claim that he’s enjoying a 92% approval rating. It’s actually less than half that: 44% in a poll released Sunday by the University of Texas and Texas Tribune. Even among Texas Republicans, Abbott’s approval is only 77%.

The governor did not step in to correct him.

Although Trump says Biden has created an “open border,” Biden has yet to scrap many Trump-era measures, to the dismay of immigrant advocates.

For months, Biden left in place the “remain in Mexico” policy that bars asylum-seekers from entering the United States until their claims are adjudicated. And another asylum tourniquet is in place: Title 42.

Even before the pandemic, Stephen Miller — architect of Trump’s immigration policies, who was on hand in South Texas — suggested invoking that obscure provision of public health law to bar and quickly expel migrants.

Biden could roll back Title 42 as soon as July 31 as the pandemic eases and vaccination rates climb.

He did carve out one exception, ending expulsion of children traveling without a parent or legal guardian. Trump and other critics view that as a signal that migrants are welcome. Biden has warned migrants to avoid the dangerous and costly trek.

During her visit a few weeks ago to Guatemala and Mexico, Harris issued stern warnings to migrants that they will be turned back.

Said Rep. Filemon Vela, D-Brownsville, a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, “The border is not a war zone, and the wall Abbott and Trump are trying to get Texans to pay for is not only a waste of their hard-earned money but also an un-American symbol of hatred.”

Staff writer Dianne Solis reported from the Rio Grande Valley. Washington Bureau Chief Todd J. Gillman reported from Washington.