President Biden’s campaign manager has insisted that the chief executive is not talking “about shutting down the border” — despite Biden’s past overtures to Republicans about doing exactly that.
Julie Chavez Rodriguez told the Washington Post in a profile published this week that “the president doesn’t talk about shutting down the border” and is “not advocating for shutting down the border.”
Earlier this year, however, while seeking to corral Republicans into backing a bipartisan Senate supplemental spending bill that included money for border security, Biden, 81, suggested that he would crack down on migration across the US-Mexico frontier.
“It’ll also give me as president, the emergency authority to shut down the border until it could get back under control,” Biden said back in January about the proposal. “If that bill were the law today, I’d shut down the border right now and fix it quickly.”
The Post contacted the Biden campaign to clarify the apparent inconsistency between Biden and Chavez Rodriguez.
Ultimately, the supplemental bill went belly up in the Senate, with Democrats blaming Republicans for wanting to preserve the border issue for the November election.
Republicans have long pummeled Biden for the record-breaking levels of migration into the US during his administration. Polls have shown Biden underwater with most of the public on border security and illegal immigration.
“Under Crooked Joe Biden, every state is now a border state. Every town is now a border town,” former President Donald Trump, 77, bellowed during a campaign speech in Michigan Tuesday.
Back in March, Biden caused a stir among progressives by referring to the suspected murderer of 22-year-old Georgia medical student Laken Riley as an “illegal” during an off-the-cuff retort at his State of the Union address.
The president later suggested that he regretted using that word, but a spokesperson later claimed that Biden “absolutely did not apologize” for that.
Chavez Rodriguez is the first Latina to run the re-election campaign of a sitting president and is the daughter of the famed labor leader Cesar Chavez.
“What people want to see is order and humanity in our immigration system,” she told the Washington Post
Early on in his presidency, Biden crowed about ripping up and rolling back a bevy of Trump’s past executive orders on immigration.
Recently, his administration has reportedly been contemplating significant executive action on the border amid the ongoing crisis.
Thus far in fiscal year 2024, there have been 1.15 million encounters at the US-Mexico border, according to the most recent data from US Customs and Border Protection, more than at this point last year, which saw a record-breaking 2.48 million encounters.
