(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) During a media briefing Wednesday, White House press secretary Karine Jean–Pierre falsely claimed that President Joe Biden had visited America’s southern border.
According to the Daily Wire, Jean-Pierre made the assertion when responding to Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy, who asked about the potential of Biden visiting the border with potential future House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.
“So, look, he’s been there. He’s been to the border,” Jean-Pierre claimed, without evidence.
“And since he took office—” she said before trailing off.
In his nearly five decades in public service, Biden went to the border only once on “a brief drive-by” while “on a campaign swing in 2008.”
Despite Biden’s having far eclipsed his recent predecessors in the number of vacations he has taken—including regular visits to his Rehoboth Beach vacation home, an opulent stay on South Carolina’s Kiawah Island at the home of a Democrat donor, and a recent Thanksgiving trip to Nantucket—he maintains that he has been too busy during his presidency to visit the border.
The closest he has come since assuming the presidency was a visit to Uvalde. The town an hour’s drive from the border, was the site of a mass shooting earlier this year involving an outcast Hispanic teenager who mysteriously was able to obtain thousands of dollars worth of guns and ammunition that he reportedly purchased himself.
After Doocy attempted to clarify Jean–Pierre’s misstatement, who responded that Biden was “taking action to fix our immigration system and secure our border.”
She then proceeded to deflect blame onto Republicans for calling attention to the border crisis.
“But, you know, that—we’re not seeing that from Republicans,” she claimed.
“We’re not seeing a willingness to work with us on—on, you know, fixing a situation that’s been around for decades now,” she continued. “Instead, they’re—they’re doing political stunts. That’s what they want to do. That’s how they want to take care of this situation.”
Biden’s first act as president was to roll back many of the border-security reforms made by former President Donald Trump, which had helped reduce the number of illegals at the border dramatically.
In contrast, Biden’s own policy has resulted in unprecedented numbers of illegal crossings, with considerably fewer deportations than any of his recent presidential predecessors. In 2022 alone, officials report that there have been an estimated 2 million encounters between border agents and illegal immigrants.
Jean–Pierre continued to boast about how the president has diverted funding to the Department of Homeland Security and assigned 23,000 agents to the area—although those agents were redirected from other critical-need areas, such as air marshals, and have been tasked not with maintaining border security but conducting welfare checks.
Jean–Pierre also neglected to mention that the suicide rate among Border Patrol officers has been rising since Biden took office.
In a statement via his MAGA PAC, Trump responding to Jean–Pierre’s comments, calling them “egregious lies” and saying the White House was putting on a show.
“America is being destroyed by the invasion of our southern border,” he said. “Lives are being lost, drugs are flooding our streets, and Joe Biden and the Radical Left would rather lie than address the problem.”
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
