President Joe Biden is facing fresh questions about whether he is in the loop inside his own administration after the rapid backpedaling on his dismissal of payments to separated migrant families as “garbage” that wasn’t going to happen.
It only took a matter of days for it to be clear that the payments will take place in some form, even if the Department of Justice will handle the details, and Biden is fine with it, though he is not entirely sure what the payouts will be.
“If in fact, because of the outrageous behavior of the last administration, you were coming across the border, whether it was legal or illegal, and you lost your child — you lost your child, it’s gone — you deserve some kind of compensation, no matter what the circumstance,” Biden said as he celebrated House passage of his $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure plan. “What that will be, I have no idea. I have no idea.”
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Beyond the issue of immigration, on which the president has for months seen some of his lowest job approval ratings because of an uncontrolled migration surge at the southern border, Biden’s command of his administration’s policy details has been questioned before.
“Look, I’m sorry. This is the last question I’ll take,” Biden quipped in an exchange with reporters earlier this year. “I’m really going to be in trouble.” When it comes to shouted reporter questions, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told fellow Obama administration alumnus and CNN commentator David Axelrod, “In fact, a lot of times we say, ‘`Don’t take questions.’”
White House climate envoy John Kerry told an interviewer that Biden “literally had not been aware of what had transpired” when there was a diplomatic row between the United States and France over the administration’s nuclear submarine deal with Australia and New Zealand.
“[Biden] asked me. He said, ‘What’s the situation?’ And I explained — he had not been aware of that. He literally had not been aware of what had transpired,” Kerry said last month. “And I don’t want to go into the details of it, but suffice it to say, that the president, my president, is very committed to strengthening the relationship and making sure that this is a small event of the past and moving on to the much more important future.”
When Biden first rejected the concept of migrant payments in an exchange with Fox News’s Peter Doocy, the American Civil Liberties Union described him in similar terms.
The ACLU, which has been negotiating with the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services about the payments on behalf of migrant parents, issued a statement saying that Biden “may not have been fully briefed about the actions of his very own Justice Department.”
The president had called a Wall Street Journal report that $450,000-per-person payments were being contemplated “garbage” and denied they were about to transpire. “That’s not going to happen,” he told reporters. “You guys keep sending that garbage out? But it’s not true.”
Biden later clarified he meant that specific dollar amount, but both he and the White House have said that the Justice Department will make that determination.
“If the DOJ determines that it saves the taxpayers money and it rights a wrong, then they will make the determination that is necessary, and I would assume if they make a determination, they’ll come up with what they think is an adequate dollar amount,” top Biden adviser Cedric Richmond told Fox News Sunday.
The president and the White House have tried to defuse the controversy by pointing out that the payments are a response to a “zero tolerance” policy instituted by former President Donald Trump. The Trump-era family separations were unpopular.
“One of the things we have to remember is [we are in the] place that we are today … because we had an administration that had an inhumane, immoral policy that was taking babies away from their families, away from their mothers,” said White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre.
“But again, the question is, we took children. President Trump took children from their parents, and some children have never been returned,” Richmond said. “Do we think that’s OK?”
It is nevertheless the latest issue where Biden’s political instincts may be different than his younger and more liberal subordinates. Questions still remain about whether, at his age (he will turn 79 later this month), he can push the young, ascendant left wing of the Democratic Party in his direction.
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Biden’s efforts to distance Democrats from “defund the police, ” tearing down statues of Founding Fathers, and socialism have at times fallen short at the ballot box, most recently in the Virginia gubernatorial election. The president is trying to lead a party riven by divisions between centrists and the Left.
“This proposal is so ludicrous that President Biden himself has called it ‘garbage’ and ‘not going to happen.’ However, open borders puppeteers within the White House made him reverse course, saying he is ‘perfectly comfortable with it,” said Matthew Tragesser, press secretary for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates for stricter immigration policies. “Is Biden in control of his own White House and federal agencies? Doesn’t look like it.”
