Biden to visit southern border Thursday — the same day as Trump
Last-minute trip shows the president leaning in on an issue he’d long ignored.
President Joe Biden will travel Thursday to Brownsville, Texas, to meet with U.S. Border Patrol agents, law enforcement, and local leaders, a White House official confirmed Monday morning.
The visit will coincide with one scheduled the same day by former President Donald Trump — the presumptive GOP presidential nominee — whose plans to travel to Eagle Pass, Texas, were made public last week.
Acknowledging the visit Monday evening to reporters traveling with him in New York City, Biden joked about the timing. “I planned it for Thursday,” he said. “What I didn’t know was that my good friend apparently is going.”
Biden’s visit underscores the recent shift in his stance on the border. After largely ignoring the GOP clamor over migration and border security during his first few years in the White House, Biden now appears increasingly eager to lean in on the issue — to shift from a defensive posture to an offensive one after congressional Republicans blocked a bipartisan compromise, which the president supported, that would have directed new funding to border agents and tightened asylum policies.
According to the White House official, Biden on his visit Thursday “will discuss the urgent need to pass the Senate bipartisan border security agreement, the toughest and fairest set of reforms to secure the border in decades.”
“He will reiterate his calls for Congressional Republicans to stop playing politics and to provide the funding needed for additional U.S. Border Patrol agents, more asylum officers, fentanyl detection technology and more,” the official continued.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Monday that the president planned to meet with Border Patrol agents, but she would not say whether he would meet with migrants — something he did not do when he visited the border near El Paso 13 months ago — or if he would announce some sort of executive order to address immigration.
Biden, who spoke to reporters inside an ice cream shop in Midtown, also demurred about a possible meeting with migrants.
“I’m not going to announce ahead of time,” he said.
