Biden says he won’t go to US border because of ‘more important things’
President Biden flew to Arizona Tuesday to give a 16-minute speech at a computer-chips factory, but said he could not visit the nearby US-Mexico border amid record illegal immigration because he had “more important things” to do.
Biden made no new policy announcements at the Phoenix plant of Taiwanese company TSMC and echoed his similar recent speeches touting economic optimism and this year’s CHIPS Act to subsidize semiconductor makers.
“Why go to a border state and not visit the border?” a reporter asked Biden on the White House lawn as he departed for Arizona.
The president replied, “Because there are more important things going on. They are going to invest billions of dollars in a new enterprise in the state.”
Biden fired up Air Force One for the more than 2,000-mile journey out West before almost immediately turning around back to Washington despite speaking a short distance from the border.
A border stop would have required a Marine One helicopter flight of about 45 minutes — roughly the same distance as between the White House and Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home, where he regularly returns for weekends.
It’s unclear if Biden ever made a visit specifically to the border during his 36 years as a senator or eight years as vice president — and Republican border-state officials routinely call on him to do so.
Arizona’s Republican attorney general Mark Bronovich said in a Fox News interview Tuesday, “We need less photo ops and more border stops from our president… More than 5 million people have illegally entered this country since Joe Biden became president.”
The US logged an all-time record of more than 2.3 million people detained for crossing the border in fiscal 2022, which ended Sept. 30 — an increase from 1.7 million in fiscal 2021, fewer than 500,000 in fiscal 2020 and nearly 1 million in fiscal 2019. The figures do not include migrants who evaded arrest.
Critics blame the border crisis on Biden’s policies, including relaxing a Trump-era policy of quickly deporting border-crossers under a CDC COVID-19 rule and also ending a policy of requiring migrants to remain in Mexico to await a court ruling on their asylum claims.
Biden said at a CNN town hall in October 2021, “I guess I should go down [to the border]. But the whole point of it is I haven’t had a whole hell of a lot of time to get down.”
Biden sparked controversy by also saying at the CNN town hall that he had visited the US-Mexico border at some point in the past — despite there being no evidence of it.
Biden said, “I’ve been there before and I haven’t — I mean, I know it well.”
The White House couldn’t provide an example of Biden visiting, however, and could point only to a Washington Post fact check that said Biden “briefly drove past the border” after landing at El Paso’s airport in 2008 for an event in Mesilla, N.M. Biden’s motorcade took “a route that for a few minutes hugs the border of the United States and Mexico.”
Republican Govs. Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida this year have bused or flown thousands of migrants from the US-Mexico border to Democratic bastions such as New York City and Washington, DC, in an attempt to pressure Biden to adopt stricter policies.
