Former Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) let President Joe Biden have it over the ongoing crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, saying on Wednesday that he had been wrong to dramatically change border policy without having a good plan in place to mitigate the potential fallout of those changes.
Cuomo made the comments during the most recent episode of his podcast — “As a Matter of Fact …” — and he even went so far as to say that “the southern states were right” when they warned Biden not to dismantle the policies left in place by former President Donald Trump and the last administration.
“It was a mistake for President Biden to open the border without having a plan to handle the tremendous flow of people,” Cuomo explained, adding, “President Biden had said he would do it in the campaign — but you can’t change a policy unless you have the program in place to manage the change.”
Cuomo’s criticism was not necessarily an attack on the Biden administration’s goals with regard to immigration reform — but rather, he argued that Biden’s team had made it clear that they either did not anticipate or failed to mitigate the “consequences of enacting those promises” that he had made during the campaign.
The disgraced former governor had equal criticism for the border states who had responded to the crisis by busing illegal immigrants to sanctuary cities, but he did acknowledge that Biden’s border policies had created an unnecessary hardship for them.
“The southern states were right that opening the border created a tremendous hardship for them to handle. They were right that the federal government was not prepared,” he said, adding, “This is a federal problem. Immigration is a federal responsibility. … The border is not just the gateway for people, but for drugs. This is on top of a homeless problem that had already strained resources in urban areas.”
Cuomo went on to say that his successor, Governor Kathy Hochul (D-NY) should have stepped in to assist when immigrants were bused into New York City — rather than leaving Mayor Eric Adams to handle the situation on his own — and appeared to throw support behind Vice President Kamala Harris’ plan to funnel investments into Central American businesses in an effort to stem the flow of illegal immigration at one of its sources.