President Joe Biden gave his first solo press conference since taking office on Thursday to a crowd of friendly hand-picked reporters.
Though Biden appeared to read from pre-prepared notes to answer many questions from the media, left-wing fact-checking site Politifact has already identified a falsehood from the president; the site also dinged Biden for “downplaying” truths.
“Thousands, tens of thousands of people who are over 18 years of age and single people, one at a time coming, have been sent back, sent home,” Biden said at the presser. “We’re sending back the vast majority of the families that are coming.”
“We rated his claim False,” Politifact reported, hours later. “While most adults coming alone are being expelled under a public health law, the same is not true for families, according to federal data.”
“In February, the latest month for which data is available, Border Patrol expelled about 41% of families (which can include a child and at least one parent) who arrived at the southwest border. Authorities turned away more than half of families in January, about 64%. Most of that month fell during the Trump administration,” the fact-checking site outlined.
Politifact also noted that Biden “blamed Donald Trump for the surge of migrants at the southwest border, saying his predecessor dismantled the country’s immigration system and failed to provide enough beds for child migrants.”
“Biden downplayed the number of migrants crossing the border, saying past years had seen similar seasonal increases,” the site said.
The crisis at the southern border has only worsened since President Biden took office. As highlighted by The Daily Wire, the president quickly moved to do away with Trump-era Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), which hold foreigners who tried to enter the U.S. illegally in camps in Mexico while they await hearings. Biden, instead, returned to the so-called “catch-and-release” policy in which illegal migrants are allowed to enter the U.S.
“Suddenly, the flow of foreigners to the border exploded,” The Daily Wire outlined. “Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents apprehended nearly 100,000 people at the border in February. Last April, just more than 16,000 were captured at the border, according to Pew data.”
There are an estimated 7,700 children in the care of the Department of Health and Human Services at the U.S.-Mexico border, according to Newsweek. As noted by The Daily Wire on Monday, an internal leaked document from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revealed that nearly 1,000 child migrants have been kept in border detention facilities for longer than 10 days, which is far longer than the 72-hour maximum amount of time children are supposed to be housed in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody.
The crisis, however, was largely under the radar in the mainstream press until this past weekend when images from crowded migrant camps leaked. The Biden administration has reportedly put what’s effectively a “gag order” on Border Patrol agents with the media, according to sources. The Biden administration has denied the “gag order” reports.