Under President Joe Biden’s “leadership,” we’ve seen record numbers of illegal immigrants surge across the border, which actually started before he was even sworn into office. They’d heard Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign promises to, in a nutshell, lay out the welcome mat complete with amnesty and a vast array of taxpayer-funded incentives for people who crossed the border, including “free” healthcare.
For nearly two years now, Republicans have relentlessly criticized Biden for refusing to visit the border, claiming he was deliberately choosing not to because he was in denial about the absolute mess his policies have made, which have among other things exhausted resources at the local level and have also put communities along the border in danger.
Whenever a reporter has asked him or anyone else in his administration about visiting, the standard responses have been to either lie by claiming he had done so in the past or to claim that he was too busy taking care of important issues here at home, which is complete BS.
So at long last, Joe Biden announced earlier this month that he would be traveling to El Paso as part of his visit to Mexico for the so-called “Three Amigos Summit,” an annual event that includes Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador where regional issues are discussed, including the border crisis.
But before Biden left Washington, D.C. we were already getting reports that downtown El Paso was being “sanitized” and scrubbed of migrant street camps prior to his arrival, presumably so Joe Biden didn’t have to see them.
Speculation at the time from critics was that Biden’s visit to El Paso would be similar to the one Vice President Kamala Harris made to the area in 2021 in her capacity as Biden’s so-called “border czar,” a trip that was widely mocked as nothing more than a photo op, especially considering she did not visit the actual border hot spots and instead met with border officials miles away.
Though Biden did end up technically “visiting” the border during his trip, he did not meet with any actual migrants. Even CNN, which normally can be seen cheerleading for Biden on any given day, noted that “reporters on the ground did not see any migrants at the respite center during the president’s visit there, nor along the motorcade routes throughout the afternoon.”
Instead, the American public was treated to photos of Biden shaking hands and walking alongside border agents as though he was doing something meaningful.
Something else we didn’t see? During Biden’s visit to El Paso, there were reportedly over 500 migrant encounters in El Paso in the 24-hour period from June 8th to June 9th, according to Fox News, all while Joe Biden was there to supposedly get a firsthand look at what was going on.
Further, the network also reported that migrant encounters for the first quarter of fiscal year 2023 have eclipsed numbers for the same period of time in fiscal year 2022.
In other words, the illegal immigrant crisis that started under Joe Biden’s watch and essentially at Joe Biden’s direction is not going to go away anytime soon. And that is, of course, largely because Joe Biden would prefer to stick his head in the sand rather than acknowledge the harsh realities on the ground which stem directly from the course he set during his campaign and then in his early days in office when he undid much of former President Donald Trump’s border policies with the stroke of a pen.
North Carolina native Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym Sister Toldjah and is a media analyst and regular contributor to RedState and Legal Insurrection.
