President Joe Biden still hasn’t been to the U.S.-Mexico border, where a humanitarian crisis of his administration’s own making has raged for the past several months. He is just too darn busy, the president explained Thursday evening during a town hall hosted by CNN.
Yes, all presidents are busy. But not all presidents make two dozen trips to Delaware over the span of 10 months.
“Do you have plans to visit the southern border?” host Anderson Cooper asked.
Biden said, “I’ve been there before, and I haven’t — I mean, I know it well.”
Let’s stop right there and review the facts. Biden hasn’t been to the border in 13 years, and even then, it was only because he drove past El Paso, Texas, on his way to a campaign event.
Asked Friday why the president said he has been to the border when the facts show this doesn’t appear to be the case, White House press secretary Jen Psaki confirmed that the last time Biden was near the border was when former President Barack Obama first ran for president.
“He did drive through the border when he was on the campaign trail in 2008,” she said.
If you think this is bad, the rest of Biden’s response Thursday evening is worse.
“I guess I should go down,” the president said. “But the whole point of it is I haven’t had a whole hell of a lot of time to get down. I’ve been spending time going around looking at the $900 billion worth of damage done by — by hurricanes and floods and weather and traveling around the world.”
As of this writing, Biden is scheduled to spend yet another weekend at his home in Delaware. This marks his 20th such trip since becoming president, according to former CBS News reporter Mark Knoller.
In total, Biden has visited Delaware 24 times since January.
The president has also done 10 weekends at the presidential retreat at Camp David, according to Breitbart’s Charlie Spiering.
“Biden enjoys leaving the White House on Friday and returning home on Monday, following a similar schedule that he enjoyed as a U.S. senator,” Spiering noted. “Instead of riding Amtrak, Biden utilizes the presidential Marine One helicopter to fly back and forth from Washington, D.C.”
He added, “In August, Biden took nine Marine One flights in just 18 days in an effort to salvage his vacation in Delaware and Camp David even as he struggled to react to his botched exit out of Afghanistan.
On Thursday, Biden scrambled to address the question of why he hasn’t prioritized visiting the border to survey the slow-rolling humanitarian crisis that has grown exponentially worse on his watch.
“I plan on — now, my wife, Jill, has been down,” he said, as if the first lady were an acceptable substitute for the commander in chief. “She’s been on both sides of the river. She’s seen the circumstances there. She’s looked into those places.”
He added, “You notice you’re not seeing a lot of pictures of kids lying on top of one another with, you know, with, you know, looks like tarps on top of them. We’ve been able to deal with that. We’ve been able to significantly increase funding through the HHS, Health and Human Services, to provide shelter for these kids and people.”
The Border Patrol recorded an astonishing 208,887 encounters with migrants in August. This figure includes apprehensions plus crossings of migrants at legal ports of entry. This number far surpasses anything seen during the Trump administration, when Biden regularly railed against the Republican administration’s harsh and “inhuman” immigration policies.
In Tapachula, Mexico, an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 asylum-seekers are sheltering in “squalid conditions,” according to Jorge Castaneda, the former foreign minister of Mexico.
Biden promised in 2020 that immigration would be one of his top priorities as president. In his defense, he never said where on his list of priorities immigration would go. As it turns out, it’s somewhere far, far below “weekends in Delaware.”
