President Joe Biden considers executive action to close US border with Mexico

President Joe Biden, under intense pressure since the earliest days of his administration to stem the record pace of unlawful immigration, said he is considering taking unilateral action to close the nation's border with Mexico if circumstances warrant such a move.

"We're examining whether or not I have that power," Biden told Univision in an interview Tuesday at the White House. "There's no guarantee that I have that power all by myself without legislation.

"Some have suggested I should just go ahead and try it, and if I get shut down by the court, I get shut down by the court. But we're trying to work that right now."

The comments to journalist Enrique Acevedo come as the Democratic president is gearing up for a rematch with former President Donald Trump, who is vowing to reinstate his own hard-line immigration policies if voters return him to the White House after the Nov. 5 election.

Biden has blamed Trump for scuttling what had been touted as a bipartisan U.S. Senate bill to address the border crisis by adding 1,500 Customs and Border Protection agents and 4,300 asylum officers. Trump urged congressional Republicans to vote against the measure to deprive Biden of a legislative victory in an election year.

When Biden and Trump in early March were holding competing events on the same day along the Texas-Mexico border, the president called out his predecessor for derailing the measure.

"Both houses supported this legislation until someone came along and said, 'Don't do that, it will benefit the incumbent,'" Biden said in Brownsville as Trump and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott were in Eagle Pass, about 300 miles away. "That's a hell of a way to do business in America for such a serious problem."

Trump returned fire in kind, saying of the border crisis: "This is a Joe Biden invasion," a term Texas Republicans have used to describe the surge in migrants and to provide cover for the state government implementing its own controversial border security measures.

Democrats and rights groups have warned against painting asylum-seekers — many of whom are escaping violence and poverty in Venezuela, Ecuador, El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua and Cuba, according to the city of El Paso — as invaders as it could trigger violence against them.

In 2019, a white, 21-year-old gunman drove more than 700 miles from his Dallas-area home to a Walmart in El Paso to kill Hispanic residents in a racist attack. Before killing 23 people and injuring nearly two dozen others, he released a manifesto online warning of an "invasion" by Hispanics in Texas.

"Texas grieves for the people of El Paso today," Abbott said just after the shooting in describing what he called one of the deadliest days in the state's history.

Border security, immigration rise as top election issues

Since the border bill's demise, such Republicans as Abbott and Texas' U.S. Sen. John Cornyn have argued forcefully that Biden currently has ample legal authority to combat unlawful immigration but has declined to use it.

"The laws on the books are roughly the same as they were when President Trump was in office, but with dramatically different results," Cornyn told reporters last week. "I believe there is no will, no desire on the part of the administration to actually enforce the law."

Even as he mulls taking executive action at the border, Biden said in the Univision interview that additional legislation is needed to gain control of the border, which has emerged as a leading issue nationally ahead of the presidential election.

"We don't have enough officers to even interview people to discern whether they have a legitimate fear or concern to qualify to come in," he said, emphasizing the need for additional asylum officers. "We don't have enough people at the border. We don't have enough machinery that we can detect fentanyl and illegal drugs coming in."

A poll released in late March by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center and The Associated Press found that while most Americans in both parties agree that more border patrol agents and asylum officers are needed at the border, nearly 7 in 10 disapprove of Biden's handling of the immigration issue.

Immigration has been an especially problematic issue for the president in Texas, which has the nation's longest border with Mexico. While Biden is not expected to carry Texas in November, the ongoing border crisis could harm his party's chances in competitive state and congressional districts in South Texas where Republicans are seeking to make gains.

Despite Republicans pointing to Trump's approach to immigration as a way to criticize his successor, the former president also expressed frustration with Congress for not giving him more power to act.

In late March and early April 2019, Trump threatened to seal the border with Mexico to stem the flow of migrants crossing into the United States. And just as Biden this year has sought to cajole members from the opposite party in Congress into action, so did an exasperated Trump five years ago this month.

"Congress must get together and immediately eliminate the loopholes at the Border!" Trump wrote in an April 3, 2019, post on Twitter. "If no action, Border, or large sections of Border, will close. This is a National Emergency!"

White House aides eventually dissuaded Trump from taking action to close the border at the time.

Less than a year later, however, Trump ordered the border to be closed to nonessential travel in an effort to contain the burgeoning coronavirus pandemic from further spreading into the United States. The order also included the nation's border with Canada.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Joe Biden may shut down border, but still wants Congress to act