Biden and Trump visits to Texas offer a tale of two border cities
The cities both men have chosen to plant their flag on immigration couldn’t be more different
Three hundred miles upriver, Eagle Pass offers a tale of a far different border city. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has transformed the riverfront community into a military front line on immigration. Razor wire and rusted shipping containers warn migrants to stay away. And military trucks and rifle-carrying troops occupy the city’s biggest park.
As President Biden and Republican contender Donald Trump head to Texas on Thursday, the cities each has chosen to plant their flag on immigration are a study of contrasts. While both hug the Rio Grande, that’s about where the similarities end. Their common origin stories — riverfront military garrisons that grew into bicultural communities — have each diverged in ways that reflect the dynamics of this contested and polemical region.
The fundamentally different responses to coping with the surge in migration illustrate the crossroads that the nation faces on one of the election’s most critical issues.
“This place for better or worse may be the fulcrum for who becomes the next president,” said former Democratic Texas state representative Poncho Nevárez, speaking of his birth city of Eagle Pass. “It’s here where we’ll find out if Biden stays president or if Trump becomes president again.”
Biden will visit Brownsville, a Democratic stronghold in sync with the party’s traditional approach to immigration, balancing border security with humanitarian considerations.
It’s there where Sister Norma Pimentel joined other civic and religious leaders in helping shepherd migrants across the border bridge after a newly elected Biden reversed Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” program three years ago. Thousands had been stuck in squalid migrant camps just across the border, forced to wait in Mexico while their asylum claims were processed.
Pimentel, director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, said it felt like the seasons at last had changed: “It was so beautiful.”
The city of nearly 190,000 residents devotes its own resources — with help from federal grants — to move migrants quickly to other places where friends and loved ones await them. And as fences, a towering wall and Border Patrol agents have cemented their presence along the Rio Grande, a network of faith-based and civic nongovernmental organizations on both sides of the border has also sprung up. They work closely with U.S. authorities to create as orderly a system as possible to help when the number of people crossing climbs.
“We are the first responders,” said Andrea Rudnick, a leader with volunteer group Team Brownsville.
Mayor John Cowen called that “the Brownsville model.” He said that when 45,000 people passed through the city in a 30-day span last year, the community was able to handle it so efficiently alongside the Border Patrol that most residents probably didn’t even notice the sizable uptick. The city remains one of the safest in the country, the mayor added.
“We’ve never had a moment that was chaotic,” he said. “It never felt out of control.”
Before 2021, rural Eagle Pass rarely saw migration numbers eclipse the sparse resources its local Border Patrol could provide. The once-sleepy town of 30,000 is isolated from other more prepared border communities in Texas. But as the number of people crossing steadily rose, the community was forced to scale up its response.
Residents, including powerful ranch owners, turned to the state for help. The region has historically elected Republicans to Congress, but to win locally, candidates usually run as Democrats, albeit conservative or moderate ones. But it’s the GOP that controls the purse strings in Texas. The Republican governor’s office stepped in to provide millions in funding through his signature border initiative, Operation Lone Star.
The Abbott administration reacted to the city’s anxieties in a way several local officials said the Biden administration has not. Many, they said, felt abandoned by the federal government. Some residents are nostalgic for Trump, whom they view as tougher on illegal migration.
“We know what policies work and don’t work,” said Freddy Arrellano, former chair of the Republican Party of Maverick County, home to Eagle Pass. “We felt safer under Trump.”
Texas has filled the vacuum — with troops, razor wire, buses, border wall and Humvees. But it has come at a cost: Eagle Pass, in essence, has become occupied territory. State troops seized Shelby Park — a critical stretch of riverfront land — and shut out U.S. Border Patrol agents. City leaders voted not to pursue legal action because they can’t afford it.
Operation Lone Star critics say the governor’s heavy-handed approach is more performance art and foolishness than practical. The hospital could use more personnel, for example, but instead state dollars have funded new cars for the county attorney’s newly renovated office — also financed by OLS, local records show.
The city’s only faith-based nonprofit that works with migrants has quietly expanded its operations. In both Eagle Pass and Brownsville, border crossings have declined thus far in 2024. The governor took credit, but Mexico has also stepped up aggressive tactics to prevent migrants from reaching its northern border.
Nevertheless, Eagle Pass’s association with “border chaos” has stuck, making it the perfect place for Trump, a candidate who thrives on disorder, to make his stand, said Nevárez.
“They benefit from this psychosis of the locals who say they are overwhelmed,” he said. “Trump sees that if there is going to be a pitched battle on this issue that he wants to be at the flash point.”
Neither border city has ever seen much result from a presidential or candidate visit, local leaders said. They expect less so in a hotly contested election year.
“I think people should see these visits the way border communities see them: ‘It’s campaign season, so here come the politicians,’” said Tami Goodlette, legal director of the Texas Civil Rights Project’s Beyond Borders program. “We should all be as skeptical of them as border communities are.”
While Brownsville is friendlier territory for Biden, he has kept in place many of his predecessor’s policies and signaled a willingness to adopt more hard-line measures that blur the distinctions between his administration and Trump’s. That is lamentable, immigration advocates said.
“It's not an option to tell migrants to wait over in Mexico. We’d like him to reach higher than that,” said longtime attorney and human rights activist Jennifer Harbury, who has worked to save the lives of migrants since the 1980s, when wars in Central America pushed thousands to flee. “I’m not happy with the lack of leadership and creativity on the part of the Democratic Party, and I’m seeing some cowardice.”
For those just arriving, being caught in the middle of the nation’s debate over immigration can feel perplexing. Erick Camejo, a university professor from Venezuela, said he’d thank Biden if he got the chance to meet him and assure him that the vast majority of migrants are like him. He is in Brownsville seeking political asylum after defying strongman Nicolás Maduro and losing his job.
“What fault do I bear for a broken immigration system,” he said. “I needed help, and this country gave me that chance.”
So far, the White House has not reached out to Brownsville’s nonprofits, as they have in the past — including Pimentel, who is widely known in Catholic circles and beyond for her work at the border. Biden is expected to meet exclusively with law enforcement and local elected leaders, several locals said. That worries some, including the president’s fellow Catholics.
Pimentel said she will be praying the president doesn’t turn his back on the human beings suffering persecution and other forms of oppression. And she hopes both political leaders don’t lose sight of respecting human beings while enforcing border security.
Wherever each lands on immigration, she said, the country would be far better treating migrant families with dignity because, “That is who America is.”
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