Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
President Joe Biden will travel to El Paso, Texas, on Sunday, January 8, to evaluate border control operations and meet with officials and community leaders who have cooperated in the management of the new immigration challenge affecting the entire Western Hemisphere with record numbers of people fleeing political oppression and gang violence in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti and Cuba.
Before the trip, the Biden government announced new immigration measures that aim to account for the eventual lifting of the Title 42 and tackle the immigration crisis on the southern border.
Those measures include extending a migrant parole process to allow entry and temporary work authorization for up to 30,000 people per month from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua.
During his visit, the president will again ask Republican lawmakers to approve funding for his request for border security and management resources in Congress and to stop blocking comprehensive immigration reform measures that he proposed from his first day in office to finally fix the immigration system.
The president will be accompanied by Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, Congressmen Verónica Escobar, Henry Cuéllar and Vicente González, El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser, El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego, and other community leaders and business.
Biden will evaluate operations at the Bridge of the Americas Port of Entry, the busiest port of El Paso, with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers. The port was recently awarded $600 million through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act to strengthen and expand it to facilitate trade, increase security and improve customs processing.
Then Biden plans a visit to the Migrant Services Center of El Paso County, which is funded by FEMA’s Emergency Food and Shelter Program, where he will meet with local officials, faith leaders, and non-governmental organizations supporting immigrants fleeing political oppression and economic collapse in their countries of origin.
The president will also hear from local business leaders on the critical economic impact immigrants have on this region in addressing labor shortages.
El Paso, a community with a tradition of receiving immigrants
The El Paso community has long been welcoming to immigrants seeking asylum, under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
In recent months, the community has served as a model of federal and local officials working together to solve difficult challenges, with community leaders joining federal authorities to shelter and support vulnerable migrants after they have been processed by CBP.
Thanks to the resources that Biden has allocated for border security and management, DHS has deployed additional agents, processing and security capabilities to El Paso, like linear ground detection systems and automated watchtowers, to speed up prosecution, increase security, and catch more people and drug traffickers.
The number of people trying to cross the border illegally in El Paso has dropped by more than 70% since mid-Decemberwhile police operations continue to result in record vehicle seizures of fentanyl.
The new immigration rules are intended to convince more prospective immigrants to file an application for immigration to the United States from where they are locatedwithout having to expose yourself to the risks of traveling to the border.
New immigration regulations
President Biden’s visit to El Paso comes on the heels of announcing additional border control measures to expand legal avenues for migration, limit illegal migration and increase border security.
These measures build on the success of the parole program for Venezuela launched in October 2022 that helped ease pressures on border communities like El Paso.
The daily average number of Venezuelan citizens found at the border in El Paso is now a quarter of what it was ahead of the launch of Venezuela’s parole process.
It may interest you:
– USCIS already has personnel “trained and ready” to accept applications from Cubans, Nicaraguans and Haitians
– Hispanic Caucus half supports Biden’s new policy on immigrants at the border
– DHS announced new measures to process immigrants seeking asylum under a Title 42 exception