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PHOTOS: El Paso Rushes to Remove Migrant Camps Ahead of Biden’s First Trip to Border

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.

In December, migrants were sleeping rough in makeshift camps around the Greyhound Bus Station in downtown El Paso. But last week the camps were cleared before Joe Biden’s visit on Sunday. These images show how the area looked before and after the operation

‘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.

His union issued an acerbic tweet when the visit was announced.

‘El Paso being cleaned up as if nothing unusual ever happened there. Just in time for Biden’s “visit to the border,”‘ it said.

‘We suggest just landing in Des Moines, Iowa and telling him it’s El Paso. He’ll never know the difference.’

Biden is expected to be on the ground for just three hours, according to the official White House itinerary.

That was not nearly enough time to get a grip on the issue, added Judd.

‘You’ve got to spend a little bit of time you’ve got to be able to speak with people,’ he said.

‘You’ve got to be able to get their ideas and three hours is not going to give him that.’

At the same time, a security officer told DailyMail.com that the number of encounters along the El Paso sector of the border had fallen to a trickle after 400 troops were deployed at the end of last month.

Official figures have yet to be released, but he said: ‘We have Texas National Guard deployed, setting up about two miles of additional concertina wire and soldiers on the border right now.

‘And we’ve seen our number of encounters and illegal crossings in urban El Paso go down dramatically.’

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