Biden finally makes it to the border for sanitized visit

January 9, 2023

President Joe Biden finally made it to the U.S. southern border on Sunday, spending a few hours in a cleaned-up, sanitized El Paso, Texas where until the visit was announced, migrants had been sleeping on near-freezing streets for lack of space in facilities.

The Secret Service were reportedly in town for days before Biden's visit, and local police and border agents cleared the migrants off the streets, sending many back across the border to Mexico.

Biden spent just three hours in El Paso and avoided the worst of what is happening there. Instead, he met with border agents about the fentanyl trafficking problem and visited the Migrant Services Center to talk to nonprofit and religious groups working there.

"He did a photo-op at the wall he defunded: Think about that. And he thinks this is some sort of success story," Jesse Watters said on Fox News, calling the visit a "fact-hiding," rather than "fact-finding," mission.

"El Paso being cleaned up as if nothing unusual ever happened there. Just in time for Biden's ‘visit to the border,’" The Border Patrol Union tweeted about the visit.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) met Biden's plane ahead of the visit and handed him a letter notifying Biden of his failure to secure the border and of the sanitization that had taken place, which said in part, “Even the city you visit has been sanitized of the migrant camps which had overrun downtown El Paso because your Administration wants to shield you from the chaos that Texans experience on a daily basis. This chaos is the direct result of your failure to enforce the immigration laws that Congress enacted.”