Donald Trump accomplished what he needed from his Texas border visit. But did Joe Biden?

If Republicans were already winning the messaging and optics war over immigration when President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump boarded their airplanes for trips to the Texas-Mexico border Thursday, the GOP was still winning it when the two men strapped themselves in for their flights back home.

After the White House announced Monday that the Democratic president would head to Brownsville to see the immigration crisis firsthand and meet with the agents on the ground dealing with an escalating record number of unlawful crossings, speculation percolated that Biden would announce a set of actions to at least stabilize the border and perhaps allow him and his party to play offense.

Trump's visit to Eagle Pass, 325 miles upstream on the Rio Grande, was announced before Biden's trip and carried no expectation other than that he'd be his usual bombastic self on the immigration issue and that Gov. Greg Abbott would continue hammering Biden's border policies as wrongheaded and dangerous. Both Republicans fully lived up to their predictable expectations.

But Biden, making his second trip as president to the Texas portion of the nation's border with Mexico, came and went with no bold announcement. Nor were there any compelling visuals that showed he and his administration were slowing the pace of unauthorized border crossings or providing humanitarian relief for the migrants, many of whom braved an arduous journey through Central America and Mexico to make their way to the United States.

More: What's going on at the border? A dramatic standoff between Texas and the White House.

The president in his public remarks indoors with a backdrop of Border Patrol officers and a few Democratic officials chastised Trump and congressional Republicans for scuttling legislation to address immigration and border security and requested their cooperation to craft another bill.

Trump was outdoors with concertina wire that Texas has installed along the Rio Grande as part of the background. There, too, was a ranking member of the National Guard and the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety. Trump said the country has "a very dangerous border, and we're going to take care of it."

In a nutshell, Trump was telling what he plans to do; Biden was asking for Congress' help.

To be fair, the split-screen imagery was not completely one-sided. Biden was forceful when he faulted Trump for leaning on GOP members of Congress to stop border legislation that if signed into law would benefit the incumbent in an election year.

"That's a hell of a way to do business in America for such a serious problem," Biden said.

Trump, on the other hand, appeared to be using the death of 22-year University of Georgia student Laken Riley for political advantage. An undocumented migrant from Venezuela has been charged with kidnapping and killing her, and Trump was quick to point that out.

"She was a beautiful young woman, just so beautiful in so many ways, and brutally assaulted, horrifically, savagely murdered," he said.

The twin visits played out eight months before the expected rematch for the presidency. And that means the stakes were higher for the president than for the challenger, assuming nothing derails Trump's drive for the nomination.

A late February Gallup poll ranked immigration as the No. 1 issue on the minds of Americans. Only 28% of respondents approved of Biden's handling of border and immigration matters while 67% disapproved.

An ABC News/Ipsos poll from around the same time found that when it comes to whom to trust to tackle the border immigration crisis, 44% sided with Trump and only 26% with Biden.

Biden's numbers on immigration from the February Gallup poll are nearly unchanged from Gallup's poll six months earlier. That suggests a calcification in the public's attitude. For that to change, it would appear that Biden needs to do more than blame Trump and plead with Congress if he wants to change the narrative of the border debate.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Biden, Trump visit Texas-Mexico border; immigration narrative unchanged