Washington: US President Joe Biden is expected to announce steps to close the Mexican border to asylum seekers on Tuesday, addressing a key point in his election battle with Donald Trump.
Biden, 81, is expected to sign the long-awaited executive order, according to US media reports.
The move is one of the toughest by a Democratic president and would see Republican Trump push back on his signature border policy amid polls that show Biden’s chances for re-election in November are shrinking.
Sources close to the news are expected to make an announcement on Tuesday, but the White House has not yet confirmed that Biden will sign the executive order with the mayor of the border city.
“What I can say is that we are always and consistently looking at all options to try and really fix the immigration system,” said press secretary Karine-en-Pierre Monday.
Pierre-Pierre accused congressional Republicans of not cooperating with Biden and not spending billions of dollars on the border, which the president is trying to work out for Ukraine and Israel.
“They decided to choose partisan politics”.
According to several US media reports, Biden said that the ban on asylum applications will begin when the number exceeds 2,500 per day and will not be lifted until the number falls below 1,500.
But face resistance on several fronts.
The plan is likely to anger some Democrats, as it would be based on the Trump administration’s toughest in years and immigration bans from some Muslim-majority countries.
It will also almost certainly be challenged in court.
Republicans have tried to make the border issue a key issue before the November 5 vote, pointing out that Biden is soft on stopping Trump’s called migration “offensive”.
In 2023 alone, more than 2.4 million migrants crossed the US southern border, mostly from Central America and Venezuela as they fled poverty, violence and disasters caused by climate change.
That number peaked at 10,000 a day in December, and though it has fallen sharply in recent months, polls show the issue remains one of Biden’s biggest challenges in the election.
Trump has spent much of his time in office trying to build a wall along the Mexican border and tossing his anti-immigration rhetoric as the White House calls for his return.
He has repeatedly spoken of migrants being “poisoned” by the blood of the United States and has suggested the possibility of returning to US military and detention camps.
Trump and his allies have also accused Biden of pursuing an open-borders policy to boost Democratic voter turnout — a charge Democrats dismiss as a racist conspiracy theory.
The Biden administration has tried to stem the tide by working with Mexico and other countries to slow the flow of migrants through enforcement and economic policies, but many voters seem to have lost him.
The announcement came a day after the US president spoke with Mexico’s first elected female president, Claudia Scheinbaum, to offer congratulations and pledges of “strength and cooperation.”
