Three hundred miles apart, President Joe Biden and likely Republican challenger Donald Trump walked the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas Thursday, dueling trips underscoring how important immigration has become for the 2024 election and how much each man wants to use it to his advantage. Each chose an optimal location to make his points, their schedules remarkably similar. They each got a briefing on operations and issues, walked along the border and gave remarks that overlapped. But that's where the comparisons ended. Biden, who sought to spotlight how Republicans tanked a bipartisan border security deal on Trump's orders, went to the Rio Grande Valley city of Brownsville. For nine years, this was the busiest corridor for illegal crossings, but they have dropped sharply in recent months. The president walked a quiet stretch of the border along the Rio Grande, and received a lengthy operations briefing from Homeland Security agents who talked to him bluntly about what more they needed. Trump, meanwhile, continued his dialed-up attacks on migrants arriving to the border, deriding them as “terrorists” and criminals after harnessing rhetoric once used by Adolf Hitler to argue migrants are poisoning the blood of America. “This is a Joe Biden invasion," Trump said. Trump was in Eagle Pass, roughly 325 miles northwest of Brownsville, in the corridor that's currently seeing the largest number of crossings. He went to a local park that has become a Republican symbol of defiance against the federal immigration enforcement practices it mocks.