Texas border resident says community is outraged over Biden visit: 'People are not happy'
Brownsville resident Deborah Bell joined 'Fox & Friends' to discuss the community's reaction to Biden's upcoming visit as the migrant surge continues.
A Brownsville, Texas resident said residents are "not happy" with President Biden ahead of his visit to the border city.
Deborah Bell explained on "Fox & Friends" that the community is concerned that Biden is not going to see the full effects of the migrant crisis, as border crossings in the Rio Grande Valley sector have dropped.
"The residents, the agents, everybody's talking about how this is gonna be a dog and pony show," Bell told Brian Kilmeade on Tuesday.
"He's coming at a wonderful time. We're in the middle of a Charro Days festival, which is a celebration between Matamoros, Mexico, and Brownsville, Texas. And so things are going to look nice. The downtown area is already cleaned up, roped off. We're getting ready to have some really great parades and some real cultural celebration going on here."
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"So things are already going to look nice, but whatever needs to be fixed will be fixed, obviously, for President Biden," she continued. "And let's say if it wasn't fixed, he doesn't care anyways. He knows exactly what he's done to our country, and he's just coming to survey his damage."
Bell shared a video showing what she suspected to be a cartel drug drop on the American side of the border in broad daylight – a video indicative of how the border crisis has affected her border community.
Brownsville resident Deborah Bell provided a video showing what she claims is a cartel drug drop on the American side of the border.
"I have a resident, in an area in South-most Brownsville that sent me a video. Very unhappy," Bell said.
"You see these people, all the immigrants lined up on the other side, which is the American side still, but nevertheless, we have a wall there built to deter them. And when the federal government comes to pick them up, they enter the pass code and open the fence and then load them on the buses and take them to the nearest processing center. It doesn't make logical sense."
Biden will visit Brownsville to assess the border crisis on Thursday according to a White House official. Meanwhile, Trump will visit Eagle Pass on the same day, which is about 325 miles away from Brownsville.
Biden is expected to use his trip to talk about the importance of passing the Senate's bipartisan border security agreement, the White House official said, adding that the president will "reiterate his calls for Congressional Republicans to stop playing politics and to provide the funding needed for additional U.S. Border Patrol agents, more asylum officers, fentanyl detection technology and more."
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President Biden and Vice President Harris. (Getty Images)
But Bell insisted the community would not welcome the president with open arms as the Rio Grande Valley sector has endured a drop in illegal crossings by 23% so far in fiscal year 2024.
"People are not happy that he is choosing right now of all times to come to Brownsville," said Bell, who's running to chair the Cameron County GOP.
"Crossings are down, but voting numbers are up and people are not happy down here," she continued.
"In the past eight years, we've had the highest Republican turnout show up in Cameron County. We've had some really great grassroots movement here, and I think the nation is taking notice."
According to a Fox News analysis published last week, nearly 7.3 million migrants are known to have illegally crossed the southwest border since Biden took office.
That number is greater than the population of 36 individual states. It comes from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which has already reported 961,537 border encounters in the current fiscal year, which runs from October through September. If the current pace of illegal immigration does not slow down, fiscal 2024 will break last year's record of 2,475,669 southwest border encounters — a number that by itself exceeds the population of New Mexico, a border state.
The total number of southwest land border encounters since Biden assumed office in 2021 is 7,298,486, CBP data shows.
"I think Biden's taking notice that the trend down here is shifting and people are very unhappy with what's going on," Bell said, adding that she had a "multitude of messages" from people looking to protest the president's visit.
Fox News' Danielle Wallace, Peter Doocy, Kellianne Jones, Bill Melugin and Chris Pandolfo contributed to this report.
