The Border Patrol Union on Monday ridiculed President Biden’s planned visit to the border this week as a cynical ploy to save his presidency at the expense of Americans’ safety.
In a statement received by Fox News Digital, the union said Biden’s planned border visit, three years into his term, “after repeatedly stating there is no crisis is too little, too late.”
The union argued that “there would be no point in visiting the border now” if the president’s assertions that he has done everything he can to secure the border were true.
Migrants wait to be processed by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol after they crossed the Rio Grande and entered the U.S. from Mexico, Oct. 19, 2023, in Eagle Pass, Texas. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)
“But even if he were to put the proper policies in place at this late hour, he’d be doing it only to try to save his Presidency. And self-serving actions when time is winding down should always give Americans pause. Common sense dictates that as a lame duck, he’d revert to his open border policies if re-elected,” the union said.
“Biden is going to the border now solely to try to save himself. Border security should never be about politics, it should always be about the safety and security of this great nation and the American people.”
Fox News Digital has reached out to the White House for a response.
The union’s statement comes as President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump will make dueling trips to the U.S-Mexico border this week, as both candidates try to turn the nation’s broken immigration system to their political advantage in an expected campaign rematch this year.
Biden will travel to Brownsville, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley, an area that often sees large numbers of border crossings. He will meet border agents and discuss the need for bipartisan legislation. It would be his second visit to the border as president. He traveled to El Paso in January last year.
The trips underscore immigration’s central importance in the 2024 presidential race, for Republicans and increasingly for Democrats, particularly after congressional talks on a deal to rein in illegal immigration collapsed.
President Joe Biden walks along a stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso Texas, Jan. 8, 2023. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)
Biden has blamed Republicans for a collapsed bipartisan border deal after Trump came out in opposition to the plan to tighten asylum restrictions and create daily limits on border crossings, which reached record highs in December.
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The Biden administration has been pairing crackdowns at the border with increasing legal pathways for migrants designed to steer people into arriving by plane with sponsors, not illegally on foot to the border. But U.S. policy right now allows for migrants to claim asylum regardless of how they arrive. And the numbers of migrants flowing to the U.S-Mexico border have far outpaced the capacity of an immigration system that has not been substantially updated in decades.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.