President Joe Biden visits US-Mexico border as immigration issue hots up

President Joe Biden walked a muddy stretch of the US-Mexico border and inspected a busy port of entry Sunday on his first trip to the region after two years in office, a visit shadowed by politics of immigration as Republicans blame him for numbers of migrants crossing into the country.

 

At his first stop, the president observed as border officers in El Paso demonstrated how they search vehicles for drugs, money and other contraband. Next, he traveled to a dusty street with abandoned buildings and walked along a metal border fence that separated the US city from Ciudad Juarez.

 

His 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?” Biden's nearly four-hour visit to El Paso 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.

 

The visit seemed designed to showcase a smooth operation to process legal migrants, weed out smuggled contraband and humanely treat those who have entered illegally, creating a counter-narrative to Republicans’ claims of a crisis situation equivalent to an open border.