President Biden finally calls the chaos on the southern border a crisis.
The shocking rhetorical twist came Saturday in a conversation with reporters in Wilmington, Florida, as Biden tried to defend his Friday flip-flop over refugee admissions.
“We are going to increase the number [of refugees allowed into the country]”Biden said when he was heading home after playing the first golf game of his presidency.” The problem was that the refugee side was working on the crisis that ended on the border with young people. “
“We couldn’t do two things at once,” he added. “But now we will increase the number.”
In his somewhat confusing comment, Biden seemed to say that the tension of handling the influx of migrant children has overburdened the nation’s immigration authorities, making it impossible for them to handle an increase in authorized refugees as well.
On Friday, hours after Biden signed an executive order that kept the Trump administration’s limit of 15,000 people for refugee admissions for this year, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki posted a hasty announcement which said the White House will reveal an unrevealed upper limit on May 15th.
The sudden switcheroo came after Progressive Democrats, led by Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (DN.Y.), excoriated the initial decision on social media.
But, in his justification, it is possible that Biden has caused a new headache in his press office, with the same word “crisis”, as his administration, including Psaki and the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas , has been avoiding for months.
The dramatic wave of migrants crossing the Mexican border into the United States – with 172,000 detained in March alone, a 15-year history – has overwhelmed the Republican Customs and Border Patrol.
“We have a very serious challenge and I don’t think the difficulty of that challenge can be overstated,” Mayorkas said at a hearing in Congress last month. “We also have a plan to address that,” he added.