{"id":18749,"date":"2023-10-08T03:55:57","date_gmt":"2023-10-08T08:55:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=18749"},"modified":"2023-10-08T03:56:03","modified_gmt":"2023-10-08T08:56:03","slug":"biden-faces-more-criticism-about-the-us-mexico-border-one-of-his-biggest-problems-heading-into-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=18749","title":{"rendered":"Biden faces more criticism about the US-Mexico border, one of his biggest problems heading into 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

MIAMI (AP) \u2014 The ad sounds like something out of the GOP 2024 playbook, trumpeting a senator\u2019s work with Republicans to crack down on the flow of fentanyl and other illegal drugs into the U.S., getting tough on Chinese interests helping smugglers, and noting how he \u201cwrote a bill signed by Donald Trump to increase funding for Border Patrol.\u201d
It\u2019s actually a commercial for Sen.\u00a0Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat\u00a0facing a tough reelection fight\u00a0that will help decide control of the Senate.
\u201cOhioans trust Sherrod Brown to keep us safe,\u201d says the narrator of the ad, sponsored by the Democrat-aligned Duty and Country PAC. His campaign declined to comment.
The message is one more indication of the political and security challenges the U.S.-Mexico border has presented for President\u00a0Joe Biden. Some Democrats across the country are distancing themselves from the White House, and polls indicate widespread frustration with Biden\u2019s handling of immigration and the border, creating a major liability for the president\u2019s re-election next year.
The Biden administration this week took two actions seen by many as moving to the right on immigration.
The Department of Homeland Security waived environmental and other reviews\u00a0to construct new portions of a border wall\u00a0in South Texas after Biden pledged during the 2020 campaign that he would build \u201cnot another foot\u201d of wall. And U.S. officials said they would\u00a0resume deportations to Venezuela\u00a0not long after the administration increased protected status for thousands of people from the country.
Both moves inflamed conservatives and liberals alike. Many Republicans accused Biden of being too late to adopt former President Donald Trump\u2019s ideas on a border wall, while liberals who oppose additional border restrictions accused the White House of betraying campaign pledges.
\u201cMy frustration has been that we are not addressing immigration in a holistic way as a country. We are depending on the president alone,\u201d said Rep. Veronica Escobar of Texas, a Democrat who represents the border city of El Paso and is a national co-chair of the Biden re-election campaign. \u201cWe are treating people from different nationalities in a different way. And the pathways that have been created are being challenged in court consistently.\u201d
Biden has said his administration moved forward with the border wall\u00a0because it was required by Congress during the Trump administration, even though he considers it ineffective. His reelection campaign pointed to Trump\u2019s record at the border, including\u00a0his administration\u2019s practice of separating immigrant families\u00a0as a deterrence measure and the temporary detention of children in warehouses in chain-link cells.
\u201cMAGA Republicans are running on the legacy of Donald Trump\u2019s playbook of family separation, caging kids, and shouting \u2018border!\u2019 without any serious solutions,\u201d said Kevin Munoz, a spokesman for Biden\u2019s reelection campaign, referring to supporters of Trump\u2019s \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d movement.
Border crossings hit two-decade highs under Trump but fell during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, with immigration authorities expelling most border crossers using public health authority known as\u00a0Title 42.
Upon taking office, Biden paused border wall construction and canceled the Trump administration\u2019s \u201c\u00a0Remain in Mexico\u00a0\u201d program, but kept expelling many people under Title 42 until this past May.
Still, border crossings are now skyrocketing, which some observers blame on his administration for creating the perception that the border was open. The White House counters that\u00a0migration has surged across the Western Hemisphere\u00a0due to regional challenges out of the administration\u2019s control.
Conservative media outlets often spotlight border crossings and blame Biden for creating what they say is a crisis. But Biden has taken criticism from many in his own party, including Democratic mayors and governors who want more help caring for newly arriving migrants.
Republican-led border states started busing thousands of immigrants to Democratic-led cities across the country, creating in many places a huge shortage of space that\u2019s led to makeshift shelters and camps.
In Chicago, O\u2019Hare International Airport is\u00a0now housing hundreds of migrants\u00a0from babies to the elderly at a shuttle bus center. They sleep on cardboard pads on the floor and share airport bathrooms.
New York Mayor Eric Adams went to Mexico this week to\u00a0implore would-be migrants not to come. He has accused the Biden administration of not providing enough money or resources for the city to process migrants, telling reporters this summer, \u201cThe president and the White House have failed New York City on this issue.\u201d
Polling suggests that Americans across the political spectrum \u2014 even some people sympathetic to immigration \u2014 are concerned.
A Marquette Law School poll of registered voters\u00a0conducted in late September\u00a0gave Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 GOP nomination, a 24-point advantage over Biden on handling immigration and border security issues \u2014 52% to 28%.
The Republican focus on immigration and the border didn\u2019t stop Democrats from\u00a0big victories\u00a0in the 2018 midterms and Biden and Democrats\u00a0beat expectations during last year\u2019s election\u00a0as well, keeping the Senate and losing the House by a tiny margin to Republicans. But there were some troubling signs even then.
About six in 10 voters then said they disapproved of how Biden was handling the issue of border security, according to AP VoteCast, a sweeping national survey of the electorate. Some 27% of Democrats disapproved of how Biden was handling the border, with one-third of Democrats who identify as moderate or conservative saying this was an issue where they disapproved of Biden\u2019s performance, according to VoteCast.
Border security was also a weak spot for Biden among independents, with 66% saying they disapproved.
Sixty-one percent of Democrats said they wanted stronger law enforcement at the border, as did two-thirds of Latino or Hispanic voters (65%).
Escobar, who is a leading Hispanic voice for the Biden campaign, said she is concerned that immigration could hurt the president\u2019s re-election efforts.
\u201cThere is going to be a tendency to blame the White House when in fact this has been a failure on Congress,\u201d she said. The last major immigration reform approved by Congress\u00a0was in 1990.
Auri Lugo, a 31-year-old Venezuelan who lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, said she thought resuming deportations was the right thing to do, adding that federal authorities should focus on expediting applications for family-based immigrant visas and the humanitarian parole program. That allows up to 30,000 people to enter the country from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Lugo, who arrived in the U.S. six years ago and has legal residency, was able to bring her 9-year-old son from Venezuela last year through the humanitarian parole program. But she\u2019s been unable to bring her mother, who was the boy\u2019s caregiver since he was 2 years old.
\u201cI think it\u2019s a good thing that they are taking action on the matter,\u201d she said. \u201cThere are a lot of Venezuelans who are in shelters, who are not working. They do not have a work permit. So they are on the streets.\u201d
Despite his 2020 promises on the border, Biden has long been more moderate on the issue than some in his party. As a senator, he voted for legislation to expand U.S.-Mexico border fencing and supported authorizing federal seizure for the construction of new barriers.
He was also vice president to Barack Obama, whose administration set records for the number of people in the country illegally who were deported, earning the president the nickname \u201c\u00a0deporter-in-chief\u00a0\u201d from some immigrants\u2019 rights activists.
The Biden administration has nonetheless taken a number of steps to try and reduce the increasing numbers of migrants arriving at the U.S. border, including setting up processing centers for migrants to apply for U.S. asylum in Guatemala and Colombia, and creating more pathways for others to come legally.
\u201cRepublicans have run on anti-immigrant sentiments, fearmongering and xenophobia for several cycles. It hasn\u2019t worked for them before and it won\u2019t work for them this cycle either,\u201d said Pili Tobar, a former senior Biden White House official and Democratic strategist. \u201cImmigration is a complex issue and there are no easy answers. This administration is working hard with the limited resources it has, to put in place balanced solutions.\u201d
apnews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MIAMI (AP) \u2014 The ad sounds like something out of the GOP 2024 playbook, trumpeting a senator\u2019s work with Republicans to crack down on the flow of fentanyl and other illegal drugs into the U.S., getting tough on Chinese interests helping smugglers, and noting how he \u201cwrote a bill signed by Donald Trump to increase […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":18750,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[2801,1169,23117,4146,8707],"class_list":["post-18749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-2801","tag-biden","tag-biggest-issue","tag-criticism","tag-us-mexico-border-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18749"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18749\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18751,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18749\/revisions\/18751"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}