President Joe Biden’s first press conference since taking office featured a heavy focus on the border crisis, the future of the filibuster, and how and whether he plans to work with Republicans — but not everything he said was completely accurate.
Despite receiving generally favorable press reviews for the hourlong appearance, Biden made some misleading or even outright false statements. Here are some:
ON THE MIGRANT SURGE
“The truth of the matter is nothing has changed,” Biden said. “It happens every single solitary year. There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March. It happens every year.”
The president is correct that within individual years, migration tends to surge seasonally. But a comparison of the current pace of immigration to that seen during the same months in previous years shows we are in historic territory.
“We are on pace to encounter more individuals on the southwest border than we have in the last 20 years,” Biden’s own Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, said in a statement on March 16.
The past year is unusual because the number of people apprehended while illegally crossing the border has increased every month since last March. A year ago, former President Donald Trump ordered border authorities to turn away anyone caught at the border immediately, including children, on the basis that doing so would prevent holding facilities from filling up with people amid the pandemic.
However, people quickly learned that getting turned away meant they would not be referred for prosecution — and they could essentially make an unlimited number of attempts to get into the United States from Mexico. As a result, the recidivism rate of people who committed that offense shot up from less than 10% before the pandemic to 3 times that rate in early 2021. Most people coming over the southern border during the past year are Mexican adults.
The picture is especially bleak when examining the data for unaccompanied children encountered at the border. More than twice as many unaccompanied minors were encountered at the border last month as during the same period last year, according to Customs and Border Protection data.
ON DETENTION FACILITIES
“In fact, [Trump] shut down the number of beds available,” Biden said. “He did not fund HHS to get people, to get the children out of those — those Border Patrol facilities where they should not be, and not supposed to be more than a few days, a little while. He dismantled all of that.”
Facing scrutiny of the conditions at overcrowded detention centers along the border, Biden blamed Trump for limiting the number of beds available for migrants awaiting processing in custody.
However, the Trump White House fought repeatedly to secure more funding for family detention spaces. Last year, the Trump administration asked Congress to fund 60,000 detention beds — a 6,000-bed increase over its 2019 request.
And the Trump administration shuffled hundreds of millions of dollars specifically to fund an increase in capacity for the Department of Health and Human Services facilities where unaccompanied minors are held.
ON THE USE OF THE FILIBUSTER
“It used to be that between 1917 and 1971, the filibuster existed. There were a total of 58 motions to break the filibuster that whole time,” Biden said. “Last year alone, there were 5 times that many. It’s being abused in a gigantic way.”
With the Senate split 50-50 and 60 votes needed to break a filibuster to pass partisan legislation, Democrats are increasingly threatening to weaken or end the filibuster.
But the point Biden was attempting to make with those statistics was misleading. Last year, Republicans controlled the Senate — so the “gigantic” number of filibusters came entirely from Democrats, not Republicans.
By contrast, Republicans have not yet filibustered any piece of legislation in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
Biden later answered “yes” to a question about whether he agreed with critics who characterized the filibuster as a “relic” of the Jim Crow era. However, the president aggressively defended the rule when he was himself a senator whose party, then in the minority, relied on the filibuster to block Republican legislation.
ON TRUMP TAX CUTS
“Did you hear [Republicans] complain when they passed close to [a] $2 trillion tax cut? Eighty-three percent going to the top 1%?”
Biden recycled a well-worn talking point about the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, passed in 2017 with only GOP support.
As the Washington Examiner’s Tiana Lowe points out, the figure would only apply if Congress allowed many of the tax cuts to expire in 2027, which will happen if lawmakers do nothing. For procedural reasons, the bill was written so the individual tax cuts would expire after 10 years, but the corporate tax cut would remain in place.
According to the Tax Policy Center, the top 1% of earners got 20.5% of the cuts, not 83%, after the bill was passed.
Those top earners would not get 82.8% of the cuts, according to the same study, until 2027 — and only if part of the bill expired. The Trump cuts did offer at least some level of relief to the vast majority of taxpayers.
ON SENDING MIGRANTS TO MEXICO
“Mexico is refusing to take them back. They are saying they will not take them back.”
Biden seemingly blamed Mexico for exacerbating the crisis on the border, arguing the country is not accepting apprehended migrants that the U.S. would like to return. He said his White House is negotiating with Mexico’s president in the hopes of convincing the Mexicans to take more migrants.
But it was Biden who ended a Trump-era policy, known as “remain in Mexico,” that forced asylum-seeking migrants to wait on the southern side of the border to have their cases heard.
That decision preceded the current surge in migration, and some of the thousands crossing into the U.S. in recent weeks have indeed been asylum-seekers who were previously awaiting processing in Mexico before Biden reversed the policy.
ON POPULARITY WITH REPUBLICANS
“But what I know I have now is, I have electoral support from Republican voters … Republican voters agree with what I’m doing.”
Biden made the claim that GOP voters support him in the context of an argument about the importance of working with congressional Republicans. The president claimed that because he enjoys that support, he does not need to focus as closely on relationships with elected Republicans.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Biden is not, however, popular with Republican voters. The Pew Research Center found just 16% of Republicans approved of his job performance in March.
A recent Gallup poll found even less support, at 10%.
Republican support for Trump, by contrast, remains high.
