Biden and Trump’s dueling border visits will encapsulate a building election clash

CNN —

Two presidents will visit the southern US border Thursday, highlighting the centrality of migrant surges to November’s election in a spectacle that will explain why America’s polarized politics has for decades failed to fix a broken immigration system.

Joe Biden and his predecessor and possible successor, Donald Trump, will tour different sectors of the border in Texas as they spell out dueling arguments on what everyone now agrees is a crisis.

They’re already feuding over their first-term records on immigration, and their visits will mark the most visible and intense manifestation yet of their likely rematch.

Former President Donald Trump delivers remarks during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Md., February 24, 2024.

Related article How the GOP’s rightward shift on immigration helps explain Trump’s primary success

The ex-president will be in Eagle Pass, scene of a border showdown between the Biden administration and Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. His visit will showcase his dark portrayal of a nation under siege from a torrent of what he claims are migrant criminals and invaders. It’s a narrative that he hopes will vault him to the presidency, just as it did in 2016. Trump is promising mass deportations and detention camps if he wins back the White House and is unleashing some of the most extreme anti-migrant rhetoric in modern American history. The apparent inhumanity is the point as he promises a strongman presidency of retribution and channels the anger of his base voters.

Biden, who’s been on the defensive over the border for much of his term, will visit Brownsville following his embrace of tougher