Hand-to-hand duel 500 kilometers away.
Joe Biden and Donald Trump go this Thursday to two points on the border with Mexico, in the State of Texas, in what represents a direct confrontation over immigration policy between the two probable candidates for the November presidential elections.
For Trump it is familiar territory.
His xenophobic messages paved the way for him to the White House in the 2016 elections and he has used the same script again.
For Biden, it is one of his weak points, given the record arrival of immigrants during his mandate.
The president, however, has found arguments to fight.
Trump goes to Eagle Pass.
Biden, to Brownsville.
Both towns are linked by the Rio Grande (Rio Grande in the United States), the watercourse of more than 3,000 kilometers that serves as the border between the United States and Mexico from El Paso to its mouth and whose currents challenge thousands of immigrants each year to go through it.
In Brownsville, already close to the Gulf of Mexico, the river draws capricious meanders that corner tongues of land from one country into the interior of the other.
Following the course of the river is the SpaceX base, owned by billionaire Elon Musk, a South African immigrant who has now become one of those who most fuels xenophobic discourse.
Biden has chosen this place in the Rio Grande Valley carefully.
For nine years, this corridor was the busiest for illegal crossings, but in recent months they have decreased considerably.
On his agenda he has a meeting at the border, then another with various immigration services and finally, a speech.
For Biden, it is his second visit to the border as president, since he went to El Paso in January of last year.
Trump, meanwhile, will intervene in what is today the hottest spot of the immigration problem, Eagle Pass, which has become the epicenter of a tough battle, with constitutional implications, that pits the federal government against that of Texas for control of immigration.
A caravan of followers of the former president arrived there this month in support of the governor, Greg Abbott, who has challenged Washington in his attempt to wrest immigration control from federal authorities.
Specifically, Trump will speak from Shelby Park, a park that Abbott took possession of and where he prohibited Border Patrol agents from operating.
The Biden administration sued and the Supreme Court allowed federal agents to cut the chain-link fence surrounding the park.
Abbott, however, has since put up more fences, defying federal authority.
The massive arrival of immigrants and the alarmist messages about it have meant that immigration has become the most serious problem in the country in the opinion of Americans, according to a Gallup poll published this week.
Despite the fact that the labor market absorbs (and needs) all the incoming labor and that crime figures have been reduced, xenophobic rhetoric spreads like wildfire, frequently incited by Trump and the rest of the Republicans.
This same week, the president of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, was in charge of denouncing crimes supposedly committed by immigrants.
“President Biden's policies are directly to blame for this ongoing catastrophe, as his administration has RELEASED dangerous illegals and criminals en masse into our country.
Stop the madness, Mr. President!
It is time for him to put the American people first and use his executive powers to secure the border,” he said.
There is little doubt that Trump will again mix immigration and crime this afternoon at the rally he will give in Eagle Pass, where preparations for his rally were being finalized this Thursday morning.
Now, however, Biden finally has something to counterattack with on his trip to Brownsville, where he will meet with U.S. Border Patrol agents, law enforcement, front-line personnel and local leaders.
For several months, the Biden administration has been negotiating with a group of senators from both parties to present a bill that would include reforms and funding to address the border problem.
The text allocated $20 billion to strengthen the resources of border patrols, immigration services, asylum agents and judges in charge of immigration matters.
When the deal was reached, however, Trump pressured GOP senators to vote against it out of pure electoral calculation.
The approval of that law did not suit his message.
If when he applied himself he had results, he couldn't ride on the back of that problem.
And even if it didn't bear much fruit, it allowed Biden to argue that he was taking consensual measures between both parties.
Trump prefers to continue pouring gasoline on the fire than to put it out and Mike Johnson has also supported him in that.
Biden has not achieved the law he wanted, but at least he has arguments: “Every day, from now until November, the American people are going to know that the only reason the border is not secure is Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican friends ” he said earlier this month, referring to the former president's Make America Great Again slogan.
This visit to Brownsville is proof of that.
The former president, meanwhile, is toughening his xenophobic messages and has come to use rhetoric that historians have compared to that of the Nazis, pointing out that immigrants “poison” the blood of Americans.
This despite being the son, grandson and husband of immigrants.
Trump claims things were much better during his presidency.
“[We have] the worst border in history and the whole country is falling apart, and criminals are coming into our country by the millions.
And I'm going to stop everything and I'm going to do it quickly," Trump says.
Apparently, Biden's visit is a response to Trump's act.
“Finally, I found a way to get him to the border.
We let it slip that we were going on Thursday (...) and suddenly, out of nowhere, he announced that he was going to go,” said the former president.
Biden attributes it to chance: “I planned it for Thursday, what I didn't know is that my good friend is apparently going to go,” he said Monday, referring to Trump, when asked at an ice cream parlor in New York.
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