White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre added a new angle to the administration’s criticism of Govs. Greg Abbott (R-TX) and Ron DeSantis, accusing both of playing political games with immigrants without offering any actual solutions for fixing the immigration system.
Both Jean-Pierre and President Joe Biden spent much of Thursday “calling out” the Republican governors for their “un-American” attempts to transport immigrants to cities along the East Coast. The press secretary continued to face numerous more questions on the topic during Friday’s briefing.
BIDEN: DESANTIS, ABBOTT ‘UNAMERICAN’ FOR USING MIGRANTS AS ‘PROPS’
“We are offering solutions. That’s what the Biden-Harris administration has been doing since day one,” Jean-Pierre told reporters during one particularly tense exchange. “What have they done? They do these political stunts, they vote against our funding requests, they vote against policies to fix this broken system. Stunts aren’t solutions here. Stunts aren’t policies.”
“We’re over here trying to govern, trying to actually fix a system that has been broken for some time, trying to fix a system that was decimated by the last administration, and all we’re seeing from them are petty and dangerous stunts,” she said. “They’re putting children’s lives at risk. They’re putting family’s lives at risk, and again, I’ll say to Republicans, again, if they are interested in solving the problem, there are many ways to do this.”
Jean-Pierre proposed Republican lawmakers vote to approve the “record funding” the Biden administration had requested for DHS and to “sign on or work with us on a comprehensive immigration reform.”
On Thursday, Biden asked for help from other Republicans in shaming Abbott and DeSantis’s behavior.
“Instead of working with us on solutions, Republicans are playing politics with human beings, using them as props,” the president said. “What they’re doing is simply wrong. It’s un-American, it’s reckless, and we have a process in place to manage migrants at the border.”
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“Republican officials should not interfere with that process by waging a political — these political stunts,” he said. “It’s long overdue for Senate Republicans to come to the table and provide a pathway for citizenship for DREAMers, those in temporary status, farm workers, and essential workers. We need to modernize our laws so businesses get workers they need and families don’t have to wait decades to be brought back together. It’s time to get it done.”
