South Carolina GOP Senator Lindsey Graham lashed out at President Joe Biden for his cavalier attitude toward the problem of illegal immigration, ripping him for eschewing a trip to the southern border so he could see first-hand how serious the problem is.
Graham referred to Title 42, the program that had been implemented during the Trump administration and had resulted in tens of thousands of illegal immigrants being prevented from illegally entering the United States.
“His policies are not working at the border, and Title 42 is about to expire,” Graham noted. “President Biden could reinstate Title 42 deportation authority with a stroke of a pen. Every Democrat voted against extending Title 42 in the Senate; every Republican voted for it.”
“When Title 42 goes away as a deportation tool, you are going to double the number of illegal immigrants coming into the country in about a week,” Graham estimated. “We are going to have 100,000 illegals coming across the border a week, in about a week, and he has done nothing to fix the problem; he has never been to the border. It is so unconscionable for him not to go to the border and listen to the agents and people trying to control the border, what life is like along our southern border.”
Then Graham let his genuine anger at Biden out: “The fact that he doesn’t go shows to me he’ s disconnected and he doesn’t give a damn. If he really gave a damn about what’s going on at the border — yeah, he doesn’t have to drop f-bombs at the White House,” he said, referring to a book that claims Biden was cursing at the White House over illegal immigration in the early stages of his administration.
“Get your ass out of the White House and go to the border! Get your ass out of the White House and go to the border,” Graham snapped.
The book claiming Biden was angry was written by Chris Whipple, whom publisher Simon & Schuster described as an “Emmy Award–winning documentary filmmaker … frequent guest on MSNBC, CNN, and NPR” and a contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Vanity Fair.
Earlier this week, Oklahoma GOP Senator James Lankford warned his colleagues how serious the problem of illegal immigration has become, saying, “To put it in perspective, what’s going on on our southern border, even before the Title 42 authority goes away … the Obama administration, the big year of the largest surge that happened on our southern border during the Obama administration was just over half a million people illegally crossed that year. The best we can tell, we’ve had half a million people illegally cross our border in the last two months. This is full-on crisis.”
Lankford pointed out that in 2022, “1.3 million people have crossed our border illegally, less than 70,000 have actually been deported this year. That is a record-low number.”