A Texas governor who refuses to implement a Supreme Court decision. The front-runner in the Republican primaries, Donald Trump, urging lawmakers in his camp to reject any compromise with the Democrats. The president, Joe Biden, announcing his intention to close the Mexican border in an emergency if Congress gives him the power to do so. And the public becoming increasingly nervous. In the United States, tensions over the issue of migration have been steadily escalating.

In this presidential election year, migration has taken center stage in the public debate while also being one of Biden's vulnerabilities. But it also lays bare the political calculations of the Republicans, who are prepared to fan the flames for electoral purposes and block any new aid package to Ukraine, an issue that has now become intertwined with it.

This migration crisis is neither a figment of Republicans's imagination nor a matter of manipulation. Pressure is high on the border with Mexico. The reasons are multi-faceted, occurring upstream across the rest of the American continent – political repression, economic and climatic catastrophe, etc. – driving millions of people northward on the roads of exile. It is also due to the long-standing impossibility of overhauling the federal system for processing migrants and reviewing American asylum law on a bipartisan basis.

The system is "broken," admitted Biden. During his first two years in office, he sought to reverse the controversial policies of his predecessor, only to be confronted by the growing influx of migrants. Since January 2023, he has tried to recalibrate his approach. The White House's idea was to require asylum seekers to file their applications in transit countries or make an appointment via an app before arriving in the US.

But the pressure has increased. During December, nearly 302,000 undocumented migrants were stopped, with regular peaks of 10,000 a day – unprecedented numbers. Between October 2022 and September 2023, border police stopped 2.4 million people, a similar number to the previous year. Among them were 169 individuals on the terrorist watchlist, a register of almost 2 million people considered to be of special interest by US intelligence services. The fear of would-be terrorists infiltrating through a porous border is widely expressed by Republicans.

One of the players in this political and security crisis is Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas. In 2023, Abbott made a name for himself by organizing the transfer of over 90,000 undocumented immigrants to large cities administered by Democrats – such as Los Angeles, Chicago and New York – allegedly in the guise of burden-sharing. He recently ordered the emergency installation of a barbed-wire wall along the Rio Grande, around the town of Eagle Pass. Deployed over nearly 50 kilometers, the barbed wire was intended to discourage would-be crossers on the Mexican side. But they also prevented federal forces, whose jurisdiction it is, from accessing the border.

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