WASHINGTON – Two years after taking office, President Joe Biden will make his first U.S.-Mexico border visit on Sunday with a stop in El Paso, where a massive influx of migrants has overwhelmed local shelters.

Republicans have long clamored for such a visit, pressing for Biden to see firsthand a crisis they blame on weak enforcement and misguided immigration policies.

“I will visit the border myself this Sunday in El Paso to assess border enforcement operations, meet with the local officials and community leaders and the folks at the border,” Biden said at the White House on Thursday.

Announcing a raft of policies meant to ease pressure by cracking down on unlawful crossing while allowing 30,000 migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti to enter the country each month, he added, “I know that migration is putting a real strain on the border and border communities.”

At the border, Biden will press Congress for record-level Homeland Security funding. He blamed GOP extremists for blocking updated immigration policies that would have averted the current crisis and lauded the religious and civic groups that have stepped up to help refugees, calling them a “powerful rebuke to the hostility and even the hate” stirred up by fearmongers who cry “invasion” and warn that English is an endangered language in the United States.

“It’s so easy to demagogue this issue,” Biden said. “The Republicans haven’t been serious about this at all.”

El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego called Biden’s border visit “long overdue,” noting that migrants have “overrun” some border communities.

Republicans needled Biden for the delay and questioned his commitment to securing the border.

“While I’m glad President Biden will finally come to the border, his visit can’t be a check-the-box photo-op like his Border Czar’s ... unserious and unacceptable” first border visit in June 2021, also in El Paso, said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. “If he wants to make this a meaningful trip that seeks tough solutions to the unmitigated disaster his policies have created, I’d be happy to point him in the right direction.”

Republicans have tauntingly labeled Vice President Kamala Harris the “border czar,” though Biden assigned her only to work with Central American countries producing large migrant flows, not to oversee border security.

Gov. Greg Abbott also invoked Harris’ first border visit.

“It’s about time that President Biden visits the southern border and addresses the crisis he created,” he said. “However, if he’s planning on simply doing a photo-op stunt like Border Czar Harris and turning a blind eye to the suffering of Texans, he should stay in D.C....He must see firsthand the unabated illegal border crossings resulting from his open border policies that are plaguing border communities.”

The administration vehemently denies that the border is “open.”

Democrats lauded the visit.

Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, the former county judge, hit Republicans for a penchant to “parachute into my district” to score political points while blocking meaningful changes to mitigate “the effects of decades of failed and outdated immigration policy.”

“I’m grateful to the White House for deploying historic resources and support for border communities and creating expanded legal pathways for asylum seekers. El Paso has been the epicenter of this humanitarian crisis,” she said.

A growing number of Republicans have demanded the resignation or impeachment of Biden’s homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas.

Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, a former chairman of the House homeland security committee, slammed Biden for waiting so long to visit the border as president, “after 5 million people have crossed illegally, and 100,000 people died because of fentanyl coming primarily from China and Mexico.”

Speaking on Fox News, he accused Biden of trying to capitalize on the “chaos” in Congress – trying to project leadership as Republicans squabble over the election of a new speaker. “He hasn’t done anything to secure the border…. You have to question the timing of this,” he said.

Biden will stop in Texas on his way to a two-day summit in Mexico City with President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

When Biden was vice president, President Barack Obama also made his first visit to the border in El Paso. That was in May 2011, four months later in his presidency. Obama mocked GOP demands for ever more border security before they would entertain a deal on immigration reform.

“Maybe they’ll say we need a moat. Or alligators in the moat. They’ll never be satisfied,” he said.

The COVID-19 pandemic suppressed labor demand, and President Donald Trump’s hardline policies and rhetoric further deterred migration, setting conditions for a boomerang effect that hit once Biden took office.

Since then, the border has seen massive increases in migrants even as a public health law, known as Title 42, remains in place that allows American authorities to turn away many people who are seeking asylum.

Abbott began sending bus loads of migrants to the nation’s capital in April to prod Biden to pay more attention to the spike. As of Tuesday, Texas had sent 16,500 migrants to Washington, New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, his office said.

Even the city of El Paso, a Democratic bastion, began sending migrants to New York and Chicago in August to relieve strained local resources.

“He’s going to come here and he’s going to deflect, he’s going to blame others,” longtime critic Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, which represents rank-and-file Border Patrol agents, told Fox News. “He’s doing it because he’s being forced to, not because he wants actual solutions.”

Al Zapanta, a Republican and CEO of the Dallas-based U.S.-Mexico Chamber of Commerce, also hit Biden for waiting so long.

“It’s about time,” he said. “He needs to see the mess on the border. We have an open border, and he needs to fix that.”

The administration rejects the idea that the border is “open.”

Ellis Island of the Southwest

El Paso has “taken the brunt of the humanitarian crisis,” said Samaniego, the county judge. “It will be important for the president to see the border firsthand. You can learn quite a lot and that can lead to more understanding of what we as a border face because of policies in Washington, D.C.”

Known as the “Ellis Island of the Southwest,” El Paso has spent weeks coping with a massive influx of migrants.

Many crossed the Rio Grande anticipating that Title 42 would end on Dec. 21 as ordered by a judge. Instead, the Supreme Court kept the policy in place pending oral arguments next month.

Trump imposed the restriction at the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Since then, it has been used 2.5 million times to expel asylum-seekers on grounds of preventing the spread of COVID-19.

Immigration advocates say the policy violates U.S. and international obligations to people fleeing persecution, and that vaccines and improved treatment have made it outdated.

Some migrants said they felt duped. Expecting Title 42 to be lifted, they had crossed the Rio Grande without being processed by immigration authorities. Now they are in limbo and face expulsion.

“Truth is, I don’t know what to do,” Gabriel Castillo, a Venezuelan man who has been sleeping in the streets, told The Dallas Morning News recently. “Many of my friends have tried getting on buses and getting out of El Paso. But now they are back in Mexico. We’re just waiting for some kind of solution.”

Even with Title 42 in place, tens of thousands of migrants have crossed into El Paso since late August, according to Customs and Border Protection data. Many were not eligible for expulsion because their home countries and Mexico would not accept them.

In the week before Christmas, the Department of Homeland Security said it moved nearly 10,000 people out of El Paso through Title 42, deportation, or transfer to other border cities in a process they call “decompression.”

The El Paso convention center provided shelter for nearly 500 people, according to Mario D’Agostino, deputy city manager. Though the number of arrivals appears to be falling, the number without proper documents is growing.

“If they continue to get in without being detected, we’re going to continue having this population grow within our community, and so that is concerning,” he said.

Todd J. Gillman reported from Washington and Alfredo Corchado reported from El Paso.