Fox Reporters Do Tag-Team Grilling About Biden Border Visit At Briefing — Jean-Pierre Swats Down Calls For ‘Stunt’ Visit

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre fielded a tag-team barrage from Fox News White House Correspondent Jacqui Heinrich and Fox Business correspondent Ed Lawrence suggesting President Joe Biden pay a visit to the border.

Fox News has long clamored for Biden to visit the border, including last week when Peter Doocy drew a laugh from KJP with this question: “Kevin McCarthy says that he invited President Biden down to the border. Has the President RSVPed?”

At Monday’s White House briefing, Lawrence and Heinrich picked up where Doocy left off, pressing Jean-Pierre on the absence of a border visit on the president’s schedule while he’s visiting Arizona:

MR. LAWRENCE: Okay. What about the — in Arizona — I just want to ask you — he’s going to that chips factory. Any plans in Arizona to go to the border and see for — the situation for himself there?

MS. JEAN-PIERRE: So, look, I want to be very clear here. The President’s trip tomorrow is about the American manufacturing boom we’re seeing all across the country thanks to, again, his economic policies — again, more than we have seen in his — his, you know, almost two-year term; more than 700,000 jobs — manufacturing jobs that have been created just here alone in the United States.

So, he’ll be visiting at TSMC, a company making a major investment to manufacturing cutting-edge chips in Phoenix. This investment will bring new jobs and economic opportunity to Arizona — very important to the people in Arizona. And it’s in large part thanks to the CHIPS and Science Act the President signed into law — and a historic — let’s not forget — a bipartisan piece of legislation.

And, look, we should be able to reach a bipartisan — you know, a bipartisan agreement on immigration too. And that’s what we’re calling for. Right? We’re asking for Republican officials to come and work with us and let’s have a bipartisan agreement on immigration, instead of doing political stunts, instead of doing what they’re doing: going to the border, not actually coming up with any real ideas about that. That’s where I will leave it.

That’s what the President is doing tomorrow. He’s going to go to Arizona to talk about an important initiative that’s going to change Americans’ lives, specifically in Arizona.

MS. HEINRICH: Thank you, Karine. Just a follow-up on Edward’s question. If the President is not going to make time to visit the border during his trip tomorrow — during his trip tomorrow to a border state, will he do it in — in the new year?

MS. JEAN-PIERRE: Look, I addressed this last week about the President visiting the border. I’m not going to go beyond what I just laid out.

I think and we believe the question, again, as I was just answering to your colleague in the back, is that: What are congressional Republicans going to do to actually deal with this issue instead of doing political stunts — many of them political stunts that hurt families, that hurt kids, that hurt children — right? — that hurt people who are — who are coming here to try to seek asylum — leaving a, you know, leaving a dictatorship?

Instead of going to the border and talking about — you know, about things that — not going to actually deliver and keep our borders safe, why don’t they work with us? Why don’t they actually do something? Why don’t they actually, you know, help the President get the funding that he requested — historic funding to — into homeland — into the Department of Homeland Security? That’s one way of doing that.

But again, they’re playing political games and doing political stunts.

MS. HEINRICH: But the reason I ask is just because the President had said previously that he hadn’t had a lot of time to get to the border. He’s going to a border state tomorrow, so you’d think maybe there would be time there. If there isn’t tomorrow, can you say, at this point, that he —

MS. JEAN-PIERRE: What I’m saying is: Tomorrow, he’s going to actually focus on an issue — a bipartisan issue that was voted in Congress — the CHIPS and Science Act — something that is going to deliver for the people in Arizona, creating jobs and making people’s lives better, and making sure that we are bringing manufacturing back into the U.S. That is critically important.

Now, what I’m saying — the second part of that, to your question: If Republican officials truly, truly want to deal with immigration — if they truly want to deal with the border, then they would stop doing political stunts and actually work with us on the plan that we have put forward, which they are not.

And that’s what we want to make very loud and clear. There’s ways to deal with this. Again, they can come and actually do this in a bipartisan way, just like we did with the CHIPS and Science Act.

Watch above via The White House.