As Biden and Trump both visit the border, how do their immigration policies compare?

Ex-president’s pitch would represent one of the most extreme immigration agendas of any president in American history

President Joe Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump will both visit the USborder on Thursday in an attempt to seize the narrative around immigration ahead of their presidential match-up later this year.

The duelling visits by the two presumptive nominees follow a record number of undocumented migrants entering the country in December and an influx of those migrants into Democratic-run cities.

Mr Trump, who is due to visit the migrant hotspot of Eagle Pass, is likely to use the backdrop of the troubled border town to accuse the Biden administration of failing to protect the border while offering his vision for a draconian immigration policy that would see mass deportations.

Republicans, particularly Mr Trump, have long used immigration as a cudgel to attack the Biden administration – even going so far as to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, homeland security secretary, by the smallest of margins in the House – 214-213.

Mr Biden, meanwhile, has accused Republicans of blocking a border deal that would address many of the issues they have long complained about at the behest of Mr Trump. He is due to meet with US Border Patrol agents, law enforcement, and local leaders, according to the White House.

The border is set to be a key issue at the general election in November, so how do the policies of both candidates compare?

Trump’s second term will be more draconian

Mr Trump used the imagined threat of a migrant invasion to propel him to the White House in 2016 — promising to build a wall that stretches the entire length of the border and force Mexico to pay for it. He appears to be following the same playbook in his second re-election bid.

The GOP frontrunner is plotting a draconian expansion of his previous anti-immigrant agenda, building on the policies that President Joe Biden’s administration has sought to reverse.

At rallies and campaign events, he has used dehumanising language to describe people arriving at the US-Mexico border in an attempt to justify his agenda.

Speaking at a rally in New Hampshire late last year, the former president echoed the pages of Mein Kampf and white supremacist manifestos by claiming that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”.

The next day, at a rally in Reno, Nevada, he accused migrants of waging an “invasion” and falsely claimed people are “charging across the border by the hundreds of thousands”.

At both rallies, he revealed his radical vision for overhauling the nation’s immigration laws, from implementing “the largest deportation operation in American history” to “ideological screenings” for people arriving at the southern border.

Put simply, if elected, the next Trump administration would upend asylum protections for thousands of people who are legally in the US; round up undocumented people living in the US and detain them at camps before they’re expelled; and prohibit children born in the US to non-citizen parents from being granted citizenship.

It would represent one of the most extreme immigration agendas of any president in American history.

Biden wants a deal

Border security and immigration have long been a political vulnerability for President Biden. A recent poll found that voters see the border as his biggest failure.

Mr Biden’s visit to the border is aimed at undercutting that impression. Late last year, Mr Biden gave his approval for his officials to join negotiations on a bipartisan bill that would address many Republican grievances about the border.

Lawmakers on both sides drafted a deal that would have overhauled the asylum system to implement tougher immigration enforcement and give new powers to the White House to expel migrants.

The deal was essentially killed when, at the urging of Mr Trump, many Republicans came out against it.

Following the failure of a deal in Congress, Mr Biden has reportedly been exploring the possibility of taking executive action to reduce the number of arrivals at the border.

The president is reportedly mulling executive action to block people who cross the southern border without legal permission from claiming asylum once inside the US, upending guarantees that protect asylum rights for people on US soil.

Such a proposal, which would bypass Congress, would mirror an illegal Trump-era measure that a federal judge had previously rejected as an unlawful attempt to “rewrite” the nation’s immigration laws to “impose a condition that Congress has expressly forbidden.”

Mr Biden’s proposed order would reportedly invoke Section 212(f) of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows the president to suspend immigration for anyone determined to be “detrimental to the interests of the United States” – the same authority Mr Trump used to unilaterally ban immigrants from majority-Muslim countries, which was later struck down in court.

The Biden administration also would reportedly raise the standards for border agents’ “credible fear” screenings for people seeking asylum and establish a “last in, first out” policy for deportations.

That proposal has angered progressives in the Democratic Party and raised warnings from rights groups.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations Refugee Convention have affirmed asylum rights for people fleeing persecution and violence. In the US, a person granted asylum is legally allowed to remain in the country without fear of deportation, and qualifies for legal work with potential pathways to permanent legal status. Those claims can only be made at the US border or within the US.

The changes would “undoubtedly violate both US and international human rights law that establish people may seek asylum regardless of whether they cross at a port of entry or between ports of entry,” Amy Fischer, director of refugee and migrant rights with Amnesty International USA, told The Independent.