by Elizabeth Crisp & Lauren Sforza | THE HILL
The latest hurdle to President Biden’s reelection effort is a 6,000-person caravan of migrants headed toward the southern border.
Immigration has been an irritant for the White House for much of Biden’s time in office, whether it has come from allies in the Democratic Party or GOP opponents.
But the headaches have grown as the border issues have become intertwined with the president’s call for Congress to deliver more aid to Ukraine.
Those talks have been at a standstill — very much because Biden tied funding for Ukraine and Israel to border security money, which then led to a thorny debate over immigration. Congress hasn’t been able to find a compromise on that issue in a generation or two, and talks between senators before the Christmas break made little progress.
Now the caravan is adding to the political toxicity of the issue for Biden, who Republicans want to cast as not taking the issue seriously enough. It also meshes with a more general argument Republicans have sought to make about Biden being too weak on the foreign and domestic stage, a point seemingly intertwined with GOP attacks on the 81-year-old president’s age.
BORDER SECURITY also is the signature issue for former President Trump, the frontrunner for the GOP nomination who is ahead of Biden in The Hill/Decision Desk average of polls by a full 2 percentage points.
The Hill’s Rafael Bernal examines the issue in a piece that notes the caravans serve a political purpose for those putting them together. They give organizers and migrants exposure for their cause, even as they give Republicans and conservative media ammunition for their attacks. That ammunition comes despite the fact that the caravans themselves rarely do anything to interfere with actual border security.
“How they get to the border if they enter illegally has no bearing on how they are processed,” a CBP official told The Hill.
The Biden administration has sought to win Mexico’s help with the caravan, which includes migrants from a host of countries. But as Bernal writes, Mexico’s president shut down the possibility of a law enforcement crackdown, arguing the “root causes” of migration must be dealt with to solve the problem.
For the time being, that would seem to put the ball back in Congress’ court when it returns in January. There has been plenty of talk of the possibility for progress in those discussions. But solving the root causes of migration? It’s fair to be skeptical of that challenge being met successfully early in the new year.
It’s all a problem for Biden, who gets criticized over the caravan, over a perceived weakness at the border and for an inability to get Ukraine aid across the finish line if progress on everything is stymied.
The administration on Wednesday said it was delivering the final $250 million it can give to Ukraine using its existing powers. The announcement came with a plea for Congress to take action.