WATCH: Craig Melvin Repeatedly Tries and Fails to Get President Joe Biden to Call Border Situation ‘A Crisis’

NBC News anchor Craig Melvin repeatedly tried to get President Joe Biden to call the situation at the southern border a “crisis,” but the president continued his administration’s refusal to do so.

On Friday morning, The Today Show aired Melvin’s exclusive interview with President Biden, which was taped Thursday at The White House. During the interview, Melvin asked the President about the southern border, which has been in the news for months due to a surge in unaccompanied minors in Border Patrol custody.

“Before you took office in January, you laid out four crises that demanded urgent action,” Melvin said, listing the pandemic, the economy, climate change, and racial inequality.

“Immigration was not one of the crises that demanded urgent action in January,” Melvin said, and asked, “Does it demand urgent action now, is what’s happening at the southern border, is it a crisis?”

“It is getting urgent action now,” Biden replied. “For example, a month ago we had thousands of young kids in custody in places they shouldn’t be, controlled by the Border Patrol. We have now cut that down dramatically.”

The president then explained that “The failure to have a real transition, the two departments that didn’t give us access to virtually anything, were the immigration and the Defense Department. So we didn’t find out they had fired a whole lot of people, that they were understaffed considerably.”

“But in April alone, Mr. President, 170,000 people, migrants, apprehended at the border. It’s a 20-year record. There are 22,000 unaccompanied children in our country right now. That’s a record. That sounds to most folks like a crisis,” Melvin said.

Biden again told Melvin that his administration had inherited an unprepared system, and cited the improvement in conditions over the past several weeks.

Some news outlets have spent months clamoring for Biden and his administration to call the border situation a “crisis,” while others have instructed their reporters not to do so, but at least where unaccompanied minors in CBP custody are concerned, President Biden is correct.

According to CNN, the number of unaccompanied minors has dropped 84 percent in one month, and the average time in custody has fallen from 133 hours to 28 hours — well below the legal limit of 72 hours.

Watch above via NBC News.

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