Adhlemy Sanchez Martinez is disturbed by the dust blowing into her Brownsville, Texas, neighborhood from a nearby dirt mining facility. Nathan Burkhart is focused on keeping local talent in the city and the Rio Grande Valley to grow the local economy. Mauricio Piña is using his marketing skills to try to improve local educators’ voter turnout.
As President Joe Biden prepares for his Thursday visit to Brownsville — some 300 miles southeast of Eagle Pass, where former President Donald Trump plans to be on the same day — Sanchez, Burkhart and Piña are enmeshed in a variety of issues they say are more directly impacting their lives than immigration.
But as much as Brownsville residents hope the nation will see that their city is more than what is often depicted in media, Biden plans to use the visit to drive the message that Republicans, at Trump’s urging, killed a bipartisan bill that would have brought some resources to the area for immigration enforcement, tightened asylum eligibility and given him authority to “shut down the border.” Trump will be delivering a very different message, steering it away from the congressional impasse and putting the blame of the immigration overflow on the Biden administration’s immigration policies.
In this part of the country, there’s much more perception of immigration as a mixed bag. Here there are families who may be a generation removed from immigration to the U.S. while also having a family member who is in the Border Patrol. People move back-and-forth each day to attend school in the U.S. or see a dentist in Matamoros, just across the border. They also understand there is danger in some of the people and goods — such as guns and drugs — that head in either direction.
“This has been happening for quite some time,” said Sanchez, a mother of two works in IT and was born and raised in Brownsville. “It always seem to be in the back burner until it’s an election year.”
Sanchez said she’s been spending most of her time trying to get officials’ attention to do something about the dust and silica blowing from the mining site into her neighborhood. She worries of what it’s doing to her health and her children’s.
But she also is concerned about her children’s future as more and more migrants arrive and law enforcement is unable to fully process them, she said.
These days, migration is in a lull in the Customs and Border Protection’s Rio Grande Valley sector, which includes Brownsville. Border Patrol encounters were down 23% last month over January 2023.
Biden has been under fire for much of his administration amid record numbers of border crossings since he lifted a Covid-era border shutdown implemented by Trump. However, data shows that illegal crossings increased as Trump shut off legal pathways to enter.
The pressure for Biden to take action on immigration intensified when Republican governors started shipping migrants released by Border Patrol to Democratic-controlled cities and states, strapping resources there and prompting outcry from Democratic officials in those cities.
Border Patrol agent Chris Cabrera, the local representative for the Border Patrol Council in the border city of McAllen, told Noticias Telemundo 40 that he welcomed Biden visit because “hopefully we can get things fixed.”
“The bad thing is when anything becomes political, it becomes divided and there are real people that suffer through this,” Cabrera said.
“They need to stop fighting and realize the reason they took that job in D.C. was to fix things and to make positive change, not for their constituents or a small group or large group but for the United States,” he said.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
