Biden: Trump is to blame for woes at border
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden on Thursday went on the offensive, blaming his predecessor for undermining efforts to address an influx of migrants at the border that Republicans have spent weeks calling a “crisis” of Biden’s creation.
“What he did — he dismantled all the elements that exist to deal with what had been a problem and has been continuing to be a problem for a long time,” Biden said as he was peppered with questions about the border at his first news conference. He took the opportunity to detail requests his transition team made to the Trump administration that were delayed or denied.
Those included stalling housing facilities for children, leaving behind staffing shortages at agencies responsible for caring for them and failing to create COVID-19 containment protocols — all of which the
Biden administration says have led to a severe lack of space in overcrowded Customs and Border Protection facilities.
“We’re building back up the capacity that should have been maintained and built upon that Trump dismantled,” Biden said. “It’s going to take time.”
It’s the latest — and most direct — example of Democrats pushing back against Republican claims that Biden’s White House created a “crisis” at the border by moving away from some of the Trump administration’s stricter immigration policies. They also say the migrant surge was fueled by statements Biden made during his presidential campaign pledging a more lenient approach.
A group of at least 18 Senate Republicans were set to travel to the border Thursday night and today to tour facilities and hold news conferences condemning the Biden administration for being slow to acknowledge and address the problem.
“What they really need is a plan, and so far I haven’t seen any plan that would actually have an impact on what is happening,” said U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican leading the Senate group.
The administration says Trump’s restrictive immigration policies did little more than create a bottleneck at the border as the number of migrants heading there — especially children — was increasing last year.
“He in fact shut down the number of beds available,” Biden said. “He did not fund HHS to get children out of those Border Patrol facilities where they should not be — they’re not supposed to be more than a few days. He dismantled all of that. So what we’re doing now is attempting to rebuild — rebuild the system that can accommodate what is happening today.
White House officials said the outgoing Trump administration
refused their requests to begin standing up temporary shelters for migrant children until Jan. 15, just before Trump left office. The officials said it can take weeks to get the facilities online. The Biden administration opened the first, in Carrizo Springs, on Feb. 22, about a month after the president was sworn in.
Since then, federal officials have opened several more influx sites, including at the Dallas convention center. White House officials said they are moving forward with plans to house thousands of children at two locations in San Antonio — Joint Base San Antoniolackland and the Freeman Coliseum — as well as Fort Bliss in El Paso and the San Diego convention center, among other locations.
The lack of space to house children has in part led to overcrowding at Customs and Border Protection facilities, such as one in Donna, near Mcallen, where pictures leaked this week by Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-laredo, showed dozens
of people, including small children and teens, packed into makeshift rooms with clear plastic walls, lying on padding on stone floors and covered with silver foil blankets.
The facility is one that the GOP senators will visit today as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has pushed unsuccessfully for the administration to allow them to bring reporters along, accusing the administration of cherry-picking sites it has allowed the press to see.
“Actual transparency from Biden would be to immediately open the Donna facility to press that is at 1,556 percent capacity,” Cruz said.
The administration said there were more than 4,900 children still in Border Patrol custody this week but that it is “making progress” on more quickly transferring them to sites run by the Health and Human Services Department. Officials said 465 children were transferred Tuesday, up from an average of 302 for the 30 days before
that.
The officials say the Biden administration has been “working around the clock” to build a more efficient system.
The coronavirus pandemic has also squeezed space at the facilities, and the Biden White House says the Trump administration did not leave behind a system to test migrants and quarantine those with COVID-19. The administration says it is testing children as they are transferred to the temporary shelters, which have isolated areas for quarantining, if necessary. It is also working with nongovernmental organizations along the border to test and quarantine the families it releases as they await asylum proceedings.
If those organizations don’t have space to quarantine, the migrants who test positive are transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The Biden White House says it also inherited an understaffed Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is tasked with finding sponsors to care for those children in the U.S., after Trump had frozen hiring at the agency. White House officials says proposals shared with the Trump administration to speed that work were “dismissed and not acted upon in a timely way.” Officials did not provide staffing figures at the resettlement office but said they are hiring more staff as quickly as possible.
Biden was asked at his news conference about reports that parents are sending their children to the U.S. because they know his administration won’t turn them away. The president responded that he won’t turn away children and that his administration is working to address the problems in the countries they’re fleeing.
“The idea that I’m going to say, which I would never do, if an unaccompanied child ends up at the border, we’re just going to let them starve to death and stay on the other side — no previous administration did that either, except Trump,” Biden said. “I’m not going to do it.”
“We’re going to do a lot in our administration,” Biden said. “That mother did not sit around the kitchen table and say, ‘You know, I’ve got a great idea, the way I’m going to make sure my son gets taken care of. … I’m going to send him on a thousand-mile journey across the desert and up to the United States because I know Joe Biden’s a nice guy and he’s going to take care of him.’ What a desperate act to have to take. The circumstances must be horrible. So we can do something about that.”
Asked about delays by federal officials in finding relatives of migrant children who live in the U.S., Biden said he is confident the speed will pick up.
“Well, they’re already getting better, but they’re going to get a whole hell of a lot better real quick or we’re going to have some people leaving,” Biden said. “We can get this done. We’re going to get it done.”