President Biden will be at the border Thursday in Brownsville, Texas, where the White House says he will press Congress to revive the bipartisan border deal that fell to a Senate filibuster.
The president will also use the trip to get an update on the border, where the illegal immigration numbers have ticked up after a dip in January.
“Afterwards, the president will deliver remarks to emphasize the need for congressional Republicans to stop putting politics ahead of our border security and pass the bipartisan border security agreement,” a White House official said in previewing the trip.
Mr. Biden hastily announced the trip after word leaked that former President Donald Trump would be headed to the border on Thursday.
Now the two men will engage in a split-screen duel, with Mr. Trump advocating for a revival of his strict policies that had left the border in relative calm in 2020, and Mr. Biden struggling for a message amid the unprecedented chaos he’s overseen.
The president’s answer is to embrace the bipartisan deal, worked out by Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma and Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut.
SEE ALSO: Violent crime wave complicates Biden’s border narrative; sanctuaries reconsider policies
That legislation would have given the president new expulsion powers, curtailed some uses of “parole” and tightened the rules on asylum. It would also have blessed Mr. Biden’s use of catch-and-release as the standard practice for many illegal immigrants, with the hope that they could be sped to faster immigration court decisions.
Analysts debated how much of the illegal immigrant flow would be derailed by it.
The proposal was defeated in a bipartisan filibuster, with a handful of Democrats joining most Republicans. The GOP lawmakers said the deal was too weak on illegal immigration while the Democratic opponents said it was too tough on those hoping to claim asylum.
Even had the proposal passed in the Senate, House Republicans already had declared it “dead on arrival” in their chamber.
Mr. Biden will argue Thursday that it deserves reconsideration.
The White House says the legislation will increase detention space to 50,000 beds, preventing Homeland Security from having to cut elsewhere. It also adds more positions to the Border Patrol, hires more asylum officers and adds judges to the immigration courts.
Mr. Biden’s trip comes at a tricky time.
In the last few days, Homeland Security has confirmed a spate of high-profile crimes were committed by illegal immigrants, many of them caught and released under Mr. Biden’s more relaxed approach to the border and others shielded by sanctuary city policies in Democrat-run jurisdictions.
Those pressures are forcing Mr. Biden into rhetorical and policy reversals.
He had previously proposed cuts to detention beds in every one of his budgets sent to Congress. Capitol Hill rejected the cuts.
He overturned Mr. Trump’s strict asylum rules, yet has since moved to revive them in some form.
In 2020, he declared that most illegal immigrants shouldn’t be deported, saying only serious felons deserved that punishment — and he made clear that drunken driving didn’t rise to that level. In particular, he said he would fire deportation officers who went after someone who didn’t meet that criteria.
“You change the culture by saying you are going to get fired. You are fired if, in fact, you do that. You only arrest for the purpose of dealing with a felony that’s committed, and I don’t count drunk driving as a felony,” Mr. Biden, then a candidate for president, told Vice.
This week, however, the White House called for sanctuary jurisdictions to start cooperating with ICE to turn over more illegal immigrants.
“We welcome local law enforcement’s support and cooperation in apprehending and removing individuals who pose a risk to national security or public safety,” a White House spokesperson told Fox News Digital. “When a local jurisdiction has information about an individual who could pose a threat to public safety, we want them to share that information with ICE.”
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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