Migrant surge at border adds to Biden's 2024 election woes

WASHINGTON − President Joe Biden began this election year between two political fires.

He needs to secure the southern border to mitigate a major liability and he needs Congress to approve additional funding for Ukraine to prevent a top foreign policy achievement from collapsing.

It’s theoretically possible for Biden to solve both problems at once since House Republicans – who traveled to Texas Wednesday to draw attention to the border issue – are demanding action in exchange for approving more aid to Ukraine.

But while Biden has been asking Congress for more funding for Border Patrol agents, immigration judges and to help the cities hosting migrants, Republicans want new immigration restrictions that many Democrats oppose.

Exacerbating Biden’s longstanding border problems has been the arrival in recent weeks of more than 10,000 migrants per day at the Southwest border.

“Every year we see an ebbs and flowing and that’s what we’re seeing at this time,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Wednesday of the increase, while also accusing House Republicans of playing politics instead of working with Democrats to address the problem.

“We’re trying to deal with this issue,” she said.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., countered that Biden has “all the authority he needs right now under existing federal law to stop this madness.”

House Republicans are planning a hearing next week on whether to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over his management of the border.

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As the political battle raged Wednesday, Yenny Córdoba waited at an El Paso, Texas, Amtrak station to board a bus to Chicago, paid for by the state of Texas.

The 42-year-old Colombian mother had traveled with her 17-year-old daughter and three other family members to the U.S. borderline. She’d seen images of a river of people crossing the dangerous – now heavily trafficked − jungle linking her country to Panama. She figured she, too, could make the trek and would be accepted at the U.S. border.

“We don’t have any criminal history. We contribute to society,” she said. “The dream is to work and to send my daughter to school, safely.”

The Biden administration is waging a losing battle with smuggling networks and social media messaging that tell migrants the path to the U.S.-Mexico border is clear. Although the administration has ramped up deportations and expedited removals, and opened limited legal pathways to the country, it’s not been enough to stop people facing violence or economic insecurity from following their hopes for a brighter future.

Democrat-led cities including New York and Chicago have been clamoring for help supporting the tens of thousands of migrants arriving, often bused in from the Texas border.

El Paso’s historic Union Station, with its stately red-brick steeple, is an occasional Amtrak stop. But the parking lot was buzzing Wednesday with buses chartered under Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star. Migrants arrived from local shelters and signed up inside the station for rides to Chicago, Denver and New York. Texas Division of Emergency Management officials looked on as migrants waited their turn to board.

“Every state in America is now a border state,” Johnson said in Eagle Pass, Texas, where he was joined by dozens of GOP lawmakers.

Former President Donald Trump weighed in with an opinion piece in the Des Moines Register, arguing the most urgent task facing the next president is ending “Joe Biden’s nation-wrecking nightmare on our southern border.”

“I am the only candidate who will stop this invasion – and I will do it on day one,” wrote Trump, the front-runner for the GOP nomination to challenge Biden.

Polls show voters trust Trump more than Biden to address immigration and secure the border.

And immigration is rising in importance as a bipartisan concern, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted at the end of last year.

“House Republicans feel like they're in a position of strength at this point,” said Chris Haynes, a political scientist at the University of New Haven and co-author of the book “Framing Immigrants News Coverage, Public Opinion, and Policy.”

Republicans are confident they can take a hard line and not be punished by the voters, Haynes said, because of how complicated immigration policy is for Americans to understand. It’s easy to grasp that masses of migrants are reaching the border. It’s harder to appreciate the various factors involved and how to address them, he said.

While Biden has threatened to veto a House-passed border and immigration bill, he’s talking with Senate Republicans about a possible compromise.

Republicans have been seeking tighter standards for asylum seekers, expanded expedited removals and restricting Biden’s ability to admit classes of migrants on an emergency basis.

Jean-Pierre expressed optimism Wednesday that Democrats can reach a bipartisan deal.

“It’s being hammered out,” she said. “We think it’s heading in the right direction.”

While it is very important for Biden’s reelection chances to get control of the border, it is even more important for humanitarian reasons, says Elaine C. Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and member of the Democratic National Committee.

"The situation there is dangerous for everybody. It's unhealthy,” she says. “And the border apparatus we have is overwhelmed.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has recorded more than 230,000 encounters at the border each of the past four months. In fiscal 2023, CBP reported nearly 2.5 million migrant encounters at the southwest border – a historical record.

Sent Rodriguez, 38, left Colombia with his Venezuelan partner and her 7-year-old daughter. They crossed through the Darien Gap jungle and traveled overland to Mexico. Corrupt Mexican law enforcement – or people posing as such – extorted them multiple times on the way to the U.S. border, he said.

“Mexico is so difficult,” he said. “The police extorting you, with the threat that they’ll deport you. I was in the military in Colombia. I know when the police are corrupt.”

The family turned themselves in to Border Patrol. U.S. border officials processed them separately but they reunited at an El Paso shelter, by chance, and were waiting to board the charter bus to Chicago. Rodriguez received a “notice to appear” in court in 2024; his partner, 32-year-old Maria Garcia, received a court date in 2028.

Thousands of other migrants, pushed by smugglers, are crossing the border between ports of entry in remote spots including Sasabe and Lukeville, Arizona; or at the border in Jacumba, California, said Yael Schacher, Refugees International director for the Americas and Europe.

“Politicians tend to think they have a lot more control over migration than they actually do,” she said.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Migrant border surge adds to Biden's election liability