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Biker Biden at beach house tells reporters border looks ‘much better than you all expected’

May 15, 2023 | | Print Article

President Joe Biden wasn’t so busy during his weekend getaway marking the end of Title 42 that he couldn’t take a brief pause to gaslight the American people with a joke about the border crisis.

(Video: CNN)

With corporate media dutifully propping him up, the president remained set on downplaying the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border that, at best, has been facilitated by the administration’s actions rather than tamped down.

As reported, Biden saw fit to take a weekend getaway to his beach house in Rehoboth, Delaware, and while out on a bike ride he paused to answer a few questions and make light of the record-breaking surge at the border.

“How do you think things are going at the border, sir, with Title 42 lifted?” a reporter in the press gaggle asked.

“Much better than you all expected,” Biden quipped as he laughed at his own remark.

To a follow-up on intentions of visiting the border, the president said, “Not in the near term no. It would just be disruptive, not anything else.”

The sunny disposition on conditions at the border piggybacked Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday where he dismissed the better part of the past week in favor of focusing on Friday and Saturday’s numbers after Title 42 had ended.

“The numbers we have experienced in the past two days are markedly down over what they were prior to the end of Title 42,” he said of the reported 6,300 encounters Friday and 4,200 Saturday.

However, what the spin glossed over was the fact, as Fox News national correspondent Bill Melugin had reported, that this week saw a record-breaking number of illegal crossings with more than 83,000 as the final days of Title 42 saw surges of over 10,000 per day.

The Border Patrol Union commented on this Sunday and put the numbers in perspective as even the abatement was just a return to the crisis as usual seen over the past few months. “[Border Patrol] averaged about 5k daily arrests in March/April. But in the 4 days prior to [Title 42] going away the daily arrests skyrocketed to more than 10k-and it remains at that level.”

Having dragged his feet on taking action, only recently moving to send U.S. troops to ease a spread-thin Border Patrol and attempting to repeat former President Donald Trump’s attempt to require asylum seekers to consult an attorney within 24 hours of interacting with U.S. officials, Biden had no problem thrusting blame on Congress.

“Well, look,” he began, after being asked if numbers had peaked and would continue dropping, “they are — they have gone down. My hope is they’ll continue to go down, but we have more — a lot more work to do. And we need some more help from the Congress as well in terms of funding and legislative changes.”

Kevin Haggerty
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