Biden heads to a border city where immigration is a ‘mixed bag’

Adhlemy Sanchez Martinez is disturbed by the dust blowing into her Brownsville, Texas, neighborhood from a nearby dirt mining facility. Nathan Burkhart is focused on keeping local talent in the city and the Rio Grande Valley to grow the local economy. Mauricio Piña is using his marketing skills to try to improve local educators’ voter turnout.

As President Joe Biden prepares for his Thursday visit to Brownsville— some 300 miles southeast of Eagle Pass, where former President Donald Trump plans to be on the same day — Sanchez, Burkhart and Piña are enmeshed in a variety of issues they say are more directly impacting their lives than immigration.

But as much as Brownsville residents hope the nation will see that their city is more than what is often depicted in media, Biden plans to use the visit to drive the message that Republicans, at Trump's urging, killed a bipartisan bill that would have brought some resources to the area for immigration enforcement, tightened asylum eligibility and given him authority to "shut down the border." Trump will be delivering a very different message, steering it away from the congressional impasse and putting the blame of the immigration overflow on the Biden administration's immigration policies.

In this part of the country, there’s much more perception of immigration as a mixed bag. Here there are families who may be a generation removed from immigration to the U.S. while also having a family member who is in the Border Patrol. People move back-and-forth each day to attend school in the U.S. or see a dentist in Matamoros, just across the border. They also understand there is danger in some of the people and goods — such as guns and drugs — that head in either direction.

“This has been