Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina … and the lettuce-growing fields of Yuma, Arizona?

The nation’s southern border has joined the early primary states as must-visits for Republican presidential contenders seeking to court the party’s voters.

Sen. Tim Scott was the latest to make the pilgrimage, visiting Yuma to get a first-hand look at one of the hotspots on President Biden’s border. He held a roundtable, where he heard the county sheriff describe the chaos of people streaming over and heard from a Spanish-speaking mother who shared the story of her 16-year-old son whose life was claimed by an overdose of fentanyl, the deadly synthetic opioid that’s become the major money-maker for smuggling cartels.

The South Carolina senator promised he would finish the border wall, add more Border Patrol agents and take the fight to the cartels.

“I was at the border of 2019 and the thing that’s changed the most is Joe Biden coming into office has allowed for more than 6 million folks across our border illegally, and that’s equally as unfortunate as that 70,000 Americans have lost their lives to fentanyl,” Mr. Scott said.

His visit follows those by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley, two other 2024 hopefuls who made stops at the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas, and former Vice President Mike Pence, who visited Arizona last year to talk border security.

They come to gather intelligence about the situation on the ground, which can often get lost in translation between agents on the front lines and the politicians and news accounts in Washington.

And they invariably pay homage to the work of former President Donald Trump, who left office with the least chaotic border in modern history — albeit one that immigration activists decried as inhumane.

Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, said the border became a must-visit location for Republicans a decade ago, after the Senate’s last major foray into immigration policy with a bill to grant an amnesty to most illegal immigrants.

That legislation cleared the Senate but never saw action in the House. But it did galvanize GOP voters, Mr. Judd said.

“That’s when the public really started to take notice of, ‘Hey, there is this major, major problem and the only thing that politicians talk about to solve the problem is to legalize these people that violate our laws,’” Mr. Judd said. “It really, really upset the public. I mean it really upset them.”

Then came Mr. Trump, who descended on the escalator to announce his campaign in 2015 with a complaint about “rapists” sneaking across the border, a vision of “a great wall” to seal it off — and a promise to have Mexico pay for it.

Like so much else about Mr. Trump, his stance became gospel for GOP voters — and the caravans of politicians to the border began.

Republican members of Congress show up to complain about Mr. Biden’s handling of the situation. So do some Democrats. Back in Washington, they proudly tick off their number of visits during hearings.

That’s just as true for the presidential hopefuls, who show up to collect the kinds of stories they can deploy on the campaign trail to show they understand the suffering of border communities under Mr. Biden.

For Mr. Scott, that meant hearing Yuma Sheriff Leon N. Wilmot talk about the 140 different nationalities of people trying to sneak into the U.S. that Border Patrol agents say they’ve encountered.

And the mother whose teenage son died of an overdose.

“He was in a coma for three days, and he never woke up,” she said.

Mr. Scott listened as the head of a food bank warned the flow of illegal immigrants has led to an unsustainable spike in people struggling to find food — jumping from250,000 people in 2019 to 340,000.

A hospital worker and the executive director of a family advocacy center that treats victims of abuse, sexual assault and sex trafficking said they are overwhelmed.

He also was told about the challenges the military faces when illegal immigrants make their way across a bombing range during live-fire exercises.

Though the border stretches nearly 2,000 miles from the California coast to the southern tip of Texas, it’s Texas and Arizona that see the visits.

Mr. Judd, who is a frequent chaperone for the visitors, said each state has something to offer.

Arizona has open deserts and a lack of agents to patrol it all. Texas has major cities right along the border, where groups of 100 or more people will barrel across at a time, expecting to get caught and then quickly released by overwhelmed agents who send them on their way deeper into the U.S.

“If you want to see cartels and their brutality, you’re gonna go to Arizona, and you’re going to look at how they just abandoned people in the middle of the desert and leave them to die,” Mr. Judd said. “If you want to see people that are giving up, you’re gonna go to Texas, and watch a large number of people just cross the border illegally, and they don’t even care that the media is picking it up, and they just give up because they know that they’re going to be released.”

Mr. Judd recalled a trip he took to McAllen, Texas, in 2001 with a delegation of 19 Senate Republicans where smugglers taunted them from across the river.

“They were shouting at us. They were shining lights on us,” he said. “They just didn’t care which is very unusual. Again, most of the time the cartels like to lay low, and smugglers like to lay low, they don’t want to be visible. But at that time, it was so obvious that the government was going to do nothing to stop them.”

As for motives, Mr. Judd said there are “disingenuous” politicians that come to the border simply for the photo op that will help them score political points, and there are those that are truly interested in solving the problem.

He’s ready to welcome either variety.

“Does it matter? No, I don’t care,” he said. “I just want the public to recognize that there is a problem.”

• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.