President Joe Biden was confronted at the airport in El Paso on Sunday by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who demanded in a hand-delivered letter that Biden act immediately to stop unauthorized immigration including by building more walls on the border.
Abbott told reporters that in his letter to Biden, he described “the chaos that his refusal to enforce the border laws” has caused in Texas and demanded a US crackdown on migrants who cross into the U.S. outside ports of entry or live in the country without authorization.
“He needs to step up and take swift action,” the governor said. The president, he said, responded that “he wanted to work with us on this.”
Biden was in Texas for his first visit to the border as president. Since he took office, the US has experienced a large increase of migrants trying to cross the southwest border. The Biden administration says many of them are fleeing despotic governments and economic deprivation in their home countries, but Republicans have labeled the situation a crisis and demanded the president stop the influx.
After briefly speaking with Abbott, Biden visited with Border Patrol agents and leaders at the Bridge of the Americas, one of the busiest ports of entry in the U.S., stopped by a stretch of border fence in El Paso and talked with leaders of a migrant assistance center in the city funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
More than 1,000 migrants a day sometimes pass through the center, they told Biden, and they asked the president for more money to provide food and kits with items like socks and soap.
“They need a lot of resources. And we’re going to get them,” Biden told reporters.
The president was not seen meeting with any migrants. His encounter with the Texas governor set the tone for the day’s events.
Abbott, a Republican, has become one of the Democratic president’s fiercest critics on immigration as border crossings have spiked. Over the last year, he has repeatedly bused migrants from Texas to Democratic-run cities to protest what he calls federal inaction on border security. The White House has lambasted the move as a stunt that exploits vulnerable people.
Several hours after receiving Abbott’s letter, Biden told reporters he hadn’t read it yet.
Abbott also criticized Mexico’s president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, accusing his government of busing migrants from the country’s south to the U.S. border. The Texas governor called the practice “reprehensible” and said “AMLO must answer” for it.
“Mexico must be a partner with Texas on the immigration process,” he said.
Biden will meet with AMLO and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday and Tuesday in Mexico City.
Abbott and other Republicans say the migration crisis is fueled by Biden’s rejection of the hard-line measures his predecessor, Donald Trump, adopted to stop border crossings and his more welcoming attitude toward refugees and people seeking asylum.
At the same time, GOP lawmakers have refused to consider Biden’s proposals to overhaul the nation’s immigration system. The president says that shows Republicans are more interested in keeping the issue alive as a hot-button controversy as they prepare to challenge Biden’s expected re-election bid in 2024.
In the meantime, the U.S. continues to employ pandemic-era border controls known as Title 42 to quickly expel migrants. The president acknowledged there is no easy fix on Thursday as he announced new measures to address the border situation.
“Our problems at the border didn’t arise overnight and they’re not going to be solved overnight. It’s a difficult problem,” Biden said. But he also lashed out at Republicans for what he called “inflammatory” talk about migration and urged them to work across the aisle to approve immigration legislation and additional border-security funds.
“Immigration reform used to be a bipartisan issue. We can make it that way again. It’s not only the right thing to do, it’s economically a smart thing to do,” Biden said. “It’s so easy to demagogue this issue.”
Abbott, though, portrayed the proposals in his letter as a solution to the immediate crisis.
“During this entire time, Joe Biden has not called me — he did not call me, nor his staff called and let us know either about his visit or to invite us, until last night,” Abbott said earlier on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.” “We got a random email to one of my staff members asking if I would be there to meet him on the tarmac.”
A White House official confirmed that Abbott was invited to meet Biden on Saturday.
In his letter, Abbott demanded that the president begin detaining more migrants and stop paroling them while they await immigration proceedings, allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement to deport more unauthorized immigrants already living in the US, prosecute border crossings between U.S. ports of entry, resume border wall construction in Texas and designate Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.
“You have violated your constitutional obligation to defend the states against invasion through faithful execution of federal laws,” Abbott wrote.
Biden entered office promising to discontinue construction of Trump’s border wall, and many of Abbott’s other proposals would — if they were enacted — anger immigrant advocates and lawmakers in the president’s party.
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(With assistance from Jenny Leonard and Akayla Gardner, Catarina Saraiva and Chris Dolmetsch.)
