SIERRA VISTA, AZ (AZFamily) – Former President Donald Trump will visit Cochise County on Thursday to tour the border, highlighting an issue Republicans see as a significant political vulnerability for Democrats.
The visit coincides with the acceptance of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
Trump will visit the same section of the US-Mexico border that his vice presidential candidate, Senator JD Vance, visited three weeks ago.
Politically, Cochise County is Trump’s favorite territory. The county strongly supported him in 2020. Republicans outnumber Democrats by party affiliation almost twice as many Republicans.
The dynamics in Cochise County also give Trump an opportunity to reinforce his claim that there is an “invasion” of migrants at the border.
Unlike other border communities where large groups of migrants voluntarily turn themselves in to law enforcement to seek asylum, most encounters in Cochise County involve migrants trying to evade capture, said Cody Essary of the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office, a member of the Southern Arizona Border Region Enforcement Team.
According to Essary, the cartel bosses instructed the smugglers to evade the police, which led to chases and accidents in the county’s urban centers.
“They don’t worry about the human life they’re carrying in the trunk of their car. They’ll still drive 120 miles an hour to evade the police,” he said.
Trump’s visit comes at a time when the number of border encounters has dropped significantly from its historic high last year and is back to the level of four years ago.
In July, the Border Patrol recorded the fewest monthly encounters since September 2020. The Tucson Sector recorded 11,722 encounters in July, 70 percent fewer than the same month in 2023.
The Biden administration attributes this decline to a new policy introduced in June that restricts border crossings.
Some critics, however, have doubts. Art Del Cueto, vice president of the National Border Patrol Council union, said the number of encounters typically drops during the warmer summer months. He believes the statistics could be misleading because they do not accurately reflect the number of fleeing migrants.
“What we need are appropriate measures to stop the influx. And how do you do that? We need real consequences. At the moment there are no consequences,” said Del Cueto.
Del Cueto, who recently appeared in a commercial supporting Trump, will be among the officials meeting the former president at the border on Thursday.
He argues that street prices for fentanyl have fallen because the drug has become easier to smuggle, and blames the Biden administration for this.
“The policies that prevent agents from being in the field, the policies that force agents to be stuck in processing centers, those very policies are leaving gaps at our southern border,” he said. “The only ones who are making money like bandits are the drug cartels that continue to bring methamphetamine, heroin and fentanyl into the United States.”
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