On Tuesday, as he was leaving the room with Vice President Kamala Harris, President Biden was asked by reporters whether there was a crisis at the southern border of the United States. Biden answered, “No. We’ll be able to handle it.”
One reporter asked him, “Did you receive a briefing about the border today?”
Biden replied, “Yes, I did.” Asked “What did you learn?” the president responded, “A lot.”
Another reporter asked, “Is there a crisis at the border, sir?”
As he left the room, Biden stated, “No. We’ll be able to handle it.”
Joe Biden is wrong.
I’ve been to the southern border many times and I have witnessed the crisis firsthand. pic.twitter.com/vOCbqdMTa2
— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) March 3, 2021
On Monday, former Acting ICE Director Tom Homan ripped the Biden administration for its policy vis-à-vis the southern border, telling Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade: “Let me address the statement made by Secretary Mayorkas that there’s not a crisis. That that’s very disturbing, because when he was a deputy secretary in 2015, Jeh Johnson, the Secretary, I met with them numerous times a week to talk about the border crossings, how many are crossing, how many being detained, how many be in ordered to be removed. And the threshold we set at the time, Brian, was a thousand. A thousand crossings a day was a bad day; it was a crisis. And now we’re dealing with 4,000 a day, four times what he considered a crisis back in 2015.”
“He is not bringing truth to the American people,” he continued. “There is certainly a crisis on the border that is manufactured and which created by the Biden administration because of their promises that they’ve made and the enticements that they’ve made to the people.”
“You don’t have to be border expert to realize when you make those type of promises, and on top of that, Brian when we give you free health care, when you make those type of promises, they’re going to come and they knew when they said these things, it was gonna cause a border crisis. They have folded to the progressive left. And it’s just incredible.”
DHS Secretary Mayorkas “made a statement yesterday that President Trump gutted the system,” Homan added. “Are you serious? He, as the secretary of Homeland Security, he has more immigration judges, he has more agents, he has more border technology, he had agreements that no other president was able to get. If anybody’s gutted the system, it’s they’ve gutted the system the last four weeks, and we see what happened. We went from historic lows to crisis unprecedented. That is what they have done.”
In late February, Axios reported on a “brewing crisis” on the southern border as the Biden administration was in custody of hundreds of children who were caught entering the U.S. without their parents at the southern border.
“The current backup is yet another sign of a brewing crisis for President Biden — and a worsening dilemma for these vulnerable children. Biden is finding it’s easier to talk about preventing warehousing kids at the southern border than solving the problem,” Axios reported. “Of the more than 700 kids waiting to be transferred to shelters overseen by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, more than 200 had been held in these Border Patrol stations for more than 48 hours.”
The next day, Axios reported, “A Customs and Border Protection staffer told top administration officials Thursday the agency is projecting a peak of 13,000 unaccompanied children crossing the border in May, sources directly familiar with the discussion told Axios.”