Photo: Alamy
With illegal border crossings reaching an all-time high, Joe Biden will finally travel to the southern border that he has only visited once since he first took office.
However, his visit to the border city of Brownsville, Texas, on Thursday was announced only after President Trump revealed his plans to visit Eagle Pass, a high-traffic border city in the Lone Star State, according to the New York Post.
Trump and Biden will host their competing events on the same day, speaking with law enforcement and experts alike. However, the areas they plan to visit will certainly paint differing pictures of the crisis along our nation’s border.
The Brownsville area, where Biden will visit, experienced 34 encounters with illegal immigrants from Sunday to Tuesday, according to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Data (CBP) data, a fraction of the numbers seen in other border towns.
The Eagle Pass area, where Trump is set to appear, experienced almost 1,300 of these encounters during this same three-day span in late February—a more than 3,640 percent increase in illegal crossings over Brownsville.
While it is certainly important for a president to make an effort to visit places experiencing hardships, such as the border communities in Texas, Biden’s visit to an area experiencing the least of this problem begs a question as to whether he is simply ignoramus or without any semblance of care.
For a man who campaigned to “restore honor and decency to the White House,” Biden’s attention, or rather inattention, to the border has been anything but decent as his administration continues to ignore the elephant in the room.
From New York City police officers facing violent attacks from a mob of illegal immigrants (that were promptly released from jail soon after their arrests), to Georgia nursing student Laken Riley’s murder at the hands of an illegal Venezuelan migrant, Americans have paid the price for this administration’s ineptitude.
In contrast, President Trump has made solving this border crisis one of his top priorities if reelected. He has pledged to reinstate many of his administration’s immigration policies “on day one” of his second term.
Among his key plans, Trump has vowed to take aggressive action against the drug cartels, indicating that he will “declare war” on them, as he did with ISIS, and use “special forces, cyber warfare, and other overt and covert actions to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership, infrastructure, and operations.”
The 45th president further added that he would work with Congress and pass legislation to ensure these “drug smugglers and human traffickers receive the death penalty” and that he would reinstate the “Remain In Mexico” policy and “build the wall.”
Construction of a wall between the United States and Mexico was one of the main promises Trump made during his 2016 campaign. He delivered on that promise days after taking office, signing an executive order to begin construction of what became nearly 500 miles of border wall.
Trump also signed into law a measure that provided $4.5 billion for humanitarian and security assistance on the border.
Meanwhile, Biden affirmed that he would attempt to mitigate the border crossings if Congress authorized $60 billion for military assistance in Ukraine, according to a report from the Associated Press.
Nonetheless, it has become obvious which president has fought to put American interests first and which has served in his own self-interest without any regard for the American people.
Regardless, Americans must ask themselves come November 2024 if they can really afford to have the southern border in its current state—or worse—for four more years or whether they want a return to putting America first.
RSBN will provide live coverage of President Trump’s remarks in Eagle Pass, Texas, on Thursday, Feb. 29, at 2:00 p.m. ET.