President Joe Biden faced a gauntlet of immigration questions during his CNN presidential town hall with Anderson Cooper.
Law student Megan Crawford invoked Biden’s past criticism for former President Donald Trump’s treatment of illegal immigrants, and she asked “given that it’s nearly been a year into your [administration], why haven’t you been to the southern border of our country? And why did your stance on allowing immigrants suddenly revert to Trump-era policies?”
Biden began his response by saying his administration has to keep the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy in effect because “the court said I had to maintain it.” He argued that Border Patrol has a dramatically reduced number of immigrant children in their custody now, and that he and Vice President Kamala Harris are working to address the root causes for immigration in Central America.
Cooper leapt off of that by noting that Biden has kept Title 42 in place, allowing the government to quickly expel immigrants from the country in order to counteract the coronavirus pandemic. Biden explained “we maintained that because of… the continued extent of Covid in those countries from which people are coming.”
It’s very, very high. And so, we maintained the policy. We are not sending back children. We send back adults and we send back large families. But we don’t send back children in that circumstance. That’s
why I have a proposal to provide for over a billion doses of Covid vaccine to the rest of the world, including a significant portion to Latin and Central America.
Cooper eventually returned to Crawford’s original question by asking Biden if he will visit the southern border. The president answered “I’ve been there before [and] I know it” before before adding “guess I should go down.”
But the whole point of it is I haven’t had a whole hell of a lot of time to get down. I’ve been spending time going around looking at the $900 billion worth of damage done by hurricanes and floods and weather and traveling around the world. My wife Jill has been down. She’s been on both sides of the river. she’s seen the circumstances there. she’s looked into those places. You notice you’re not seeing a lot of pictures of kids lying on top of one another with what looks like tarps on top of them. We’ve been able to deal with that. We’ve been able to significantly increase funding through the HHS to provide shelter for these kids and people. But, there’s much more to be done. It is a thing that concerns me the most about being able to get control of it.
Watch above, via CNN.