President Joe Biden will visit El Paso, Texas, on Sunday — his first time at the U.S.-Mexico border since taking office — in connection with his meeting next week in Mexico City with the leaders of Mexico and Canada, a senior administration official said Thursday.
At the border, he will address “enforcement operations” and meet with local authorities, a senior administration official said, as well as call on Congress to do more to reform the immigration system and address the border.
The president was also announcing a new immigration pathway on Thursday that would encourage migrants from Venezuelua, Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua to apply for temporary status in the U.S. instead of coming to the border. Agents will also begin to expel people from those countries back to Mexico, in an effort to relieve record numbers of arrivals.
Biden had first told reporters Wednesday in Kentucky that he intends to make the visit, saying upon his return to the White House that he hoped to see “what’s going on” at the border.
There have been large increases in the number of migrants at the border even as a U.S. public health law remains in place that allows American authorities to turn away many people seeking asylum in the United States. Republican leaders have criticized the president for policies that they say are ineffective on border security and they have questioned why he has not made a trip there yet.
Immigration will be among the top talking points at the summit Monday and Tuesday when Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are hosted by Mexico President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Early in his presidency, Biden put Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of the White House effort to tackle the migration challenge at the border and work with Central American nations to address central causes of the problem. She visited El Paso in June 2021 and was criticized for choosing a location too far from the epicenter of border crossings that straining federal resources.
For now, the Supreme Court has for kept in place Trump-era restrictions, often known as Title 42 in reference to a 1944 public health law, after Biden acted to end them and Republicans sued in response. Title 42 was invoked to prevent the spread of COVID-19, but there always has been criticism that the restrictions were used as a pretext by then-President Donald Trump to seal off the border.
The Biden administration has yet to lay out any systemic changes to manage an expected surge of migrants should the restrictions end. In Congress, a bipartisan immigration bill was buried shortly before Republicans assumed control of the House.
Trump visited the U.S. side of the border as president several times times, including one trip to McAllen, Texas, where he claimed Mexico would pay for the border wall.
American taxpayers ended up covering the costs. Mexican leaders had flatly rejected the idea when Trump pressed them early on. “NO,” Enrique Peña Nieto, then Mexico’s president, tweeted in May 2018. “Mexico will NEVER pay for a wall. Not now, not ever. Sincerely, Mexico (all of us).”
