President Biden DOES have a problem he needs to address….
Trump is trying to make it worse….
President Biden is planning to make a rare visit to the southern border on Thursday, according to two people briefed on the plans, traveling to Brownsville, Texas, on the same day that former President Donald J. Trump has already scheduled a border trip.
The plans underscore the urgency now propelling Mr. Biden and his team on immigration, which has become one of his most serious political liabilities. Under the Biden administration, record numbers of migrants have crossed the southern border — a fact that Mr. Trump and Republicans have wielded aggressively against Mr. Biden.
A majority of Americans disapprove of Mr. Biden’s job performance, and polls show that voters who disapprove of him cite immigration more than any other policy issue as a reason.
On his Thursday trip to Brownsville, Mr. Biden plans to meet with Border Patrol, law enforcement and local officials, according to a White House official. The president is expected to put the blame for the migration crisis on House Republicans, who blocked a bipartisan package that would have enacted severe restrictions at the border, and to call on Congress to come together and address the challenge….
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The executive order Mr. Biden is considering would shut down the border to new arrivals if more than an average of 5,000 migrants per day tried to cross unlawfully in the course of a week, or more than 8,500 tried to cross in a given day. It is likely to be blocked by the courts, but even the rollout of such an order would allow the White House to deflect accusations that it is avoiding the crisis and would continue to put pressure on Republicans to come to a legislative compromise.
Where that stands, though, is uncertain. At a White House meeting with governors on Friday during the National Governors Association conference, Mr. Biden told the governors that lawyers had told him he could not use the kinds of measures that Mr. Trump had, according to two people familiar with the remarks. It was unclear specifically which authority he was referring to.
By making the visit to the border, the White House appeared to be hoping to avoid the kind of political backlash it faced when Mr. Biden took roughly a year to visit East Palestine, Ohio, after a Norfolk Southern train derailed and spilled a toxic mess in the small town….