Joe Biden will travel to the US-Mexico border on Thursday amid rising concerns expressed by voters nationwide over immigration, as pressure builds on the US president to respond to alarmist rightwing claims of an “invasion”, “crisis” and waves of “migrant crime”.
But when Biden arrives in Brownsville, Texas, he is likely to encounter scenes like those prevailing earlier this week in the city of almost 200,000 that lies at the eastern end of the border. Shoppers walked the streets and preparations were under way for annual binational celebrations, Charro Days and Sombrero fest, which highlight the city’s close relationship with its Mexican sister city, Matamoros.
Border patrol processing facilities in downtown Brownsville, where people can usually be found before or after making a formal request for asylum, and the bus station, where they are often heading out of town, were empty after a drop in the number of people crossing the border in the last two months.
Migration into the US is often cyclical and affected by numerous factors. Brownsville has gone through periods in a given year when nearly 1,000 people are crossing in a day, straining local resources, while others wait on the Mexican side of the border, often for months, trying to get an appointment with the US authorities to ask for asylum. But Biden can expect to find things calm and orderly.
Priscilla Orta, a local advocate and director of Project Corazon at Lawyers for Good Government, said simply: “There is no crisis.”
She added: “I think that part of the border is by far the most secure, the safest, the most well-regulated. The most empathetic [federal law enforcement] are the border unit here in Brownsville,” she said.
Some 300 miles upstream along the Rio Grande, which marks the border in Texas, Donald Trump will make a dueling appearance on Thursday, descending upon what is effectively a militarized zone created by the hard-right Texas governor, Greg Abbott.
There will be dramatic scenes in the small city of Eagle Pass, featuring concertina wire and national guard soldiers posted on land abutting the river thathas been cleared of vegetation or taken over for military-style patrols. Abbott has asserted that the state of Texas has the right to supersede federal jurisdiction over immigration enforcement, citing “an invasion” of migrants and claiming Biden has abandoned border security.
Trump is sure to double down on his biased rhetoric and pledge to enforce extreme immigration protocols, such as his recent campaign message that if he wins back the White House in November he would engage the largest ever mass deportation event of undocumented people from the US.
People attempting to exercise their national and international right to request asylum in the US have drowned, or been cut on the razor wire at Eagle Pass that Texas constantly increases at the river, alongside buoys, despite court orders opposing the measures. Many migrants detour for hours or days to cross elsewhere instead.
Last week a federal judge in Austin expressed skepticism about the militarization when considering a request from the Department of Justice and advocacy groups to halt a new Texas law due to go into effect on 5 March allowing state, rather than federal authorities alone, to arrest anyone they suspect of crossing the border unlawfully.
Abbott has cited an invasion of migrants to entitle Texas to adopt a warlike footing under the US constitution. But the US district judge David Ezra said at the hearing last week, as reported by the Texas Tribune: “I haven’t seen, and the state of Texas can’t point me to any type of military invasion in Texas.”
The justice department argued strongly that there was no invasion, nor any evidence of abandonment by the Biden administration of enforcing immigration law.
On Thursday morning, Ezra blocked the law.
At the previous hearing, Ezra did add, however, that he “to some substantial degree” agreed with Texas’s concerns. Before the recent drop, record numbers of people predominantly from Mexico and Central and South America, but also some Caribbean and African countries and dozens of other places around the world, were crossing the border without authorization, driven by factors ranging from political oppression, violence, war, poverty and the climate crisis.
This intermittently causes chaos at the border, with people sleeping on the streets, desperately waiting in overfull shelters in some Mexican border cities and dying in large numbers attempting to enter the US across river, desert or in a smuggler’s packed vehicle.
Despite obvious problems, Andrea Rudnik, a volunteer organizer with the humanitarian assistance group Team Brownsville, said: “I have to say that there’s no invasion” of migrants. She added: “The majority of them are upstanding people that are fleeing horrible situations in their home countries. I’m not saying that there can’t be a bad apple in the group, but that is not the majority of the people that are coming.”
As recently as December, a large outdoor holding area in Eagle Pass was filled with people who had crossed the border from Piedras Negras, Mexico, and turned themselves in to US border patrol. This week, however, the outdoor holding areas and the heavily fortified riverfront were empty apart from troops and police. Eagle Pass’s only NGO that assists migrants, Mission Border Hope, was quiet.
Amerika Garcia Grewal, founder of the Eagle Pass Border Coalition that opposes Abbott’s crackdown and Trump’s campaign visit, said: “Trump is exploiting Eagle Pass for political gain. Abbott’s physically dividing our community with concertina wire around our golf course and Trump is trying to divide our community with his hate.”
Biden campaigned for the White House on fixing what he still admits three years in is America’s broken immigration system. It may be fairer than Trump’s but is not the orderly and humane system candidate Biden promised.
Orta believes Biden hasn’t tackled the system comprehensively.
“The real problem is that we don’t have enough judges to decide cases and we don’t have enough asylum officers. From top to bottom, the immigration system no longer reflects the needs of the 21st century,” she said.
“The president just doesn’t have the emotional fortitude for it,” Orta said. “It’s a real fight and I don’t think he wants to fight. I think he just really wants to coast. We have a system which can function if we fund it,” she added.
With legislation once again stalled in Congress, Biden is reportedly devising executive action that leans into the tougher conservative talk he has been increasingly echoing and away from arguments about human rights and the economic benefits of immigration, in the US and globally.
In the meantime it appears US talks with Mexico are producing a fresh crackdown effect south of the border. Winter weather deters crossings but Garcia Grewal said she had noticed that as 2024 unfolded, migrants stopped arriving in the area “like someone turned a water faucet off”.
Across the border in Piedras Negras she said she saw several units of Mexican military and state police and that her father, while traveling further south, had encountered Mexican immigration checkpoints. The Mexican authorities and others appear to be doing more to stop people reaching the US border, leaving many stuck, homeless and even more vulnerable to the drug and human smuggling cartels that, Rudnik warned, kidnap, extort and rape undocumented travelers.
“Imagine having to live, outside, in that kind of environment and have no protection,” she said.
Back in Brownsville, Orta worries that Biden will be next to crack down. Will he announce measures such as the Trump-style MPP (Migrant Protection Protocols), known as Remain in Mexico, that makes people wait south of the border for already elusive US asylum appointments, or expand his tentative additions to Trump’s border barrier?
“I’m terrified of him announcing another MPP. I know he promised he wouldn’t. He also promised he wouldn’t build the wall. Right?” she said.
