McAllen, Texas — Former President
Donald Trump
on Sunday is bringing his 2024 presidential campaign to the U.S.-Mexico border, where he is expected to tout the dramatic immigration restrictions he has vowed to enact if voters send him back to the White House.
Trump, the frontrunner to win the Republican presidential nomination, will be hosted by Texas’ Republican Gov.
Greg Abbott
, another fierce critic of President Biden’s immigration and border policies. The campaign event will take place in Edinburg, a small city in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, one of the busiest sectors for unlawful border crossings, and a region where Republicans have made inroads with its predominantly Hispanic communities in recent years.
In recent weeks, the rhetoric on immigration from Trump, the presumed Republican presidential nominee, has escalated, amplifying the scope of his promises on the issue, which some of his advisers credit with his victory over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016. In one recent interview, he claimed that migrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”
During his presidency, Trump implemented a crackdown on illegal and legal immigration, taking unprecedented actions that included reducing immigrant admissions, restricting access to the asylum system, constructing hundreds of miles of border wall, and ending temporary deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants, including those who arrived in the U.S. as children.
But Trump has pledged to intensify his hardline immigration agenda if he’s elected in 2024, committing to execute the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, expand his travel bans, deny birthright citizenship to the American-born children of unauthorized immigrants, and refute legal immigrants with opposing political beliefs. Trump has also refused to rule out reviving his infamous migrant family separation policy, which he discontinued in 2018 following widespread public outcry.
Abbott, who has not yet endorsed a presidential candidate, has prioritized immigration as a top issue during his governorship, leading Texas in opposition to Mr. Biden’s migration and border policies.
Since Mr. Biden took office, Abbott has ordered state officials to
fortify the banks
of the Rio Grande with razor wire and river barriers, directed Texas troopers to arrest migrant adults on trespassing charges, and authorized the state to bus tens of thousands of migrants to Democratic-led cities, mainly New York City and Chicago.
Abbott is also soon expected to sign
what would be
the most stringent state immigration law in modern American history, known as SB4, which will empower state law enforcement officials to arrest migrants on new illegal entry criminal charges, and allow state judges to issue deportation orders to suspected violators.
After it passed the Texas legislature earlier this month, the bill was condemned as draconian and unconstitutional by the Mexican government, Democratic lawmakers, and the American Civil Liberties Union, which has vowed to challenge the measure. SB4 will almost certainly also incite another legal clash with the Biden administration, as immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility.
In recent days, Mr. Biden’s reelection campaign has capitalized on Trump’s 2024 immigration promises, portraying them as radical and cruel in a public
messaging campaign
it hopes will galvanize Latinos to vote against the former president.
“Trump has been unapologetically open about the extreme, inhuman, and fundamentally un-American policies that he would enact if he found his way back into the Oval Office,” Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Mr. Biden’s campaign manager, said on a press call on Saturday ahead of Trump’s visit to the Texas border.
Biden faces his own political challenges on immigration, one of his worst-polling issues. His administration has been under growing pressure from Republicans and many Democrats to limit the entry of migrants along the southern border, where migrant apprehensions have reached record levels over the past three years.
In a recent statement, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said the former president is gaining more support among Latinos and other minority voters because “they know he is the only one who can secure the border,” faulting Mr. Biden for the record spike in migrant crossings.
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