When President Joe Biden makes his first visit to the border with Mexico on Sunday, he will hear from aid workers helping manage the immigration crisis and from local officials desperate for more support.
What he won't see are the miserable makeshift camps dotted around El Paso that triggered headlines last month about migrants taking over the streets.
On Tuesday and Wednesday law enforcement teams moved through the downtown area, picking up migrants who had entered the country illegally.
As a result, he may get a view of the border but not of the crisis, say infuriated border agents who wanted him to see the scale of the chaos last month.
'It's a dog and pony show,' said a volunteer helping dozens of migrants seeking shelter at the Sacred Heart Church. 'They've cleaned it all up for him.'
Officials say they are just enforcing the rules and that any timing is coincidence.
But a day before the president's arrival and the scene could not be more different to the chaos of late December. Migrant numbers surged then as arrivals timed their journeys to coincide with the expected end of Title 42 — a Trump-era restriction that eventually won a stay of execution at the Supreme Court.
Then hundreds of mainly Venezuelan refugees camped out on the sidewalks around the Greyhound Bus station in downtown.
Now their bundles of clothes and belongings are gone after border agents moved through the area during the week.
Only a few dozen migrants remained on the sidewalk around the Sacred Heart Church downtown on Saturday. Illegal arrivals say they are protected by the church's sanctuary status so long as they do not step off the kerb.
Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, said his 18,000 members had been waiting two years for Biden to come and see what they had to deal with every day.
He said the White House knew what it was doing with a January visit.
The number of daily encounters had dropped from about 7500 a couple of weeks ago, he said, to about 3300 now — a seasonal pattern that happens every year.
'Biden has all those figures. He knows all the trends. He knows when the best time to come to the border. And he knows that the beginning of January is absolutely the best time,' he said.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...dens-visit-border-crossings-drop-trickle.html
