President Joe Biden is making an admission about the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border.
On Wednesday, a reporter asked the president to elaborate on his statement that it will be “chaotic” at the border once the pandemic-era policy Title 42 expires.
“We’ve had chaos at the border for a number of years,” Biden responded.
He added, “We have to fully fund the border security efforts… Look, the purpose of what we’re doing now is making real immigration more streamlined… and moving in the direction that people know that there’s a legal way to get here and not a legal way.”
Watch the video below:
Q: "Can you expand on what you meant when you said there's going to be chaos at the border?"
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) May 10, 2023
BIDEN: "Say that again?"
Q: "Can you expand on what you meant when you said there'd be chaos at the border?"
BIDEN: "We've had chaos at the border for a number of years" pic.twitter.com/TBqJFPCmcs
His comment was made a day before Title 42, which allowed officials to quickly expel migrants, is set to expire.
Officials are bracing for the end of the policy to usher in a wave of illegal border crossings with one estimate suggesting there could be 13,000 people crossing the border every day. Even before the policy expired, Fox News reported Border Patrol officials encountered 10,000 migrants crossing the border three days in a row.
Biden administration officials have repeatedly insisted the border is “closed” and “secure.“
In September, Vice President Kamala Harris told NBC News, “The border is secure, but we also have a broken immigration system, in particular, over the last four years before we came in, and it needs to be fixed.”
“We have a secure border in that that is a priority for any nation, including ours and our administration,” she continued, adding, “But there are still a lot of problems that we are trying to fix given the deterioration that happened over the last four years.
While the administration insists the border is secure, the country saw two consecutive years of record-breaking numbers of border crossings.
The 2021 fiscal year set a new record as Border Patrol officials detained 1.7 million migrants at the border.
However, that record was shattered by more than a million in the 2022 fiscal year as officials detained 2.76 million migrants at the border.
In 2021, Biden labeled an influx of migrant children at the border a “crisis.“
But White House officials later insisted there was “no change in position” about the situation at the border.
“Children coming to our border seeking refuge from violence, economic hardships and other dire circumstances is not a crisis,” an official told CNN.
And since then the administration has tried to avoid using the word “crisis” while speaking about the border.